


Dracula

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume IV [7]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Dracula - Bram Stoker, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Jules Verne - Freeform, M/M, Metafiction, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Vampyres, Victor Hugo - Freeform, bram stoker - Freeform - Freeform, grossness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-25
Updated: 2016-09-05
Packaged: 2018-07-18 04:54:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 53,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7300381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The journey to reunite our heroes and heroines takes an unexpected turn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. At the Back of the North Wind

**Author's Note:**

> This chapter is brief, but hopefully titillating! Gird your loins, Audience: Winter is coming! :D

**Paris, 1867**

_One day, the pulpit in the Petit-Picpus convent was occupied by a young priest of high rank, M. Le Duc de Rohan, peer of France, officer of the Red Musketeers in 1815 when he was Prince de Léon, and who died afterward, in 1830, as cardinal and Archbishop of Besançon._

Or so it says in the magnum opus by M. Hugo, the idea for which germinated while he was living in the Hôtel de Rohan-Guémené, in rooms on the second floor that had been inhabited by the celebrated courtesan Marion Delorme two hundred years previously.

_M. de Rohan, quite unknown to himself, was an object of attention to the school-girls. At that epoch he had just been made, while waiting for the episcopate, vicar-general of the Archbishop of Paris. It was one of his habits to come tolerably often to celebrate the offices in the chapel of the nuns of the Petit-Picpus. Not one of the young recluses could see him, because of the serge curtain, but he had a sweet and rather thin voice, which they had come to know and to distinguish. He had been a mousquetaire, and then, he was said to be very coquettish, that his handsome brown hair was very well dressed in a roll around his head, and that he had a broad girdle of magnificent moire, and that his black cassock was of the most elegant cut in the world. He held a great place in all these imaginations of sixteen years._

A young priest, nobleman and former musketeer, captures not only the imagination of sixteen-year olds. This is why one day in 1865 two ladies alighted from the cab in the rue that M. Hugo had dubbed Petit-Picpus in his novel and passed through the gate into the courtyard surrounded by walls hung with vines. In 1865, Marie Duplessis had been dead for almost two decades, and the body of the woman who now bore a different name was forty years old. It was not an old age by any means. But perhaps due to an irony of Fate, who enjoys a cosmic joke like the next anthropomorphic entity, perhaps due to a Gypsy curse that had been put on the peasant girl whose body she wore, she had succumbed to illness before her time.

“I never dreamed I would one day see Madame de Chevreuse become a nun,” the Lady in White said as she led the other down the path, the picture of the solicitous companion. She was not one day older than twenty-four, and her pale poplin de laine dress shimmered enticingly under the folds of her travel cloak. “Not even when she became a respectable widow.”

“Two of Madame de Chevreuse’s daughters were abbesses. It runs in the family.”

“An abbess?” A flash of bright lynx eyes, a sly smile. “That is an ambitious plan.”

“I wish the M. l’évêque de Vannes was here to see us. He would be very proud.”

“He’s busy praying to a pagan god.”

“Most fervently, I’m sure. I haven’t heard from him in a long time.”

“Perhaps he duelled with one of the Anemoi and it ended badly.”

“For him or for them?”

“Not for him. Never for him. If there is one man who knows how to survive, it’s the Bishop of Vannes.”

“Amen.” And the bishop’s old mistress crossed herself with an air of Christian piety that would have befitted Louise de La Vallière.

Before the two ladies, the door to the cloister loomed.

***

**Iași, February 1867**

The hills of Iași were covered in a glimmering sheen of snow, punctuated by the skeletons of trees that peppered the banks of the frozen waters of the Bahlui River. The guesthouse we had occupied lay on the outskirts of the city, away from the hustle and bustle of the commercial epicenter of a country about to be rechristened as Romania.

The heedless caress of Boreas beat against my extremities and ruffled my mink-fur hat, which I had pulled firmly over my brow. After more than a decade in the Eurasian steppes, the North Wind had become a familiar friend indeed. I took a moment to let my eyes scan once more over Marie’s last letter, calling us back to France. The prescient nymph had been correct to assume that never again would we meet each other in her last guise. Whom had she chosen as her new vessel, I wondered? Would I recognize her again as I had the last time I beheld her in Paris, when she had reigned supreme as Marie Duplessis?

An arm wrapped around me, and Aramis’ cold nose burrowed into the back of my neck.

“You’re an icicle, zaïnka,” I teased. “Get back indoors.”

“I was coming to ask you to do the same. Bartleby has stoked the fireplace and Grimley is brewing tea.”

The bells of the nearby monastery sounded sext and I hid Marie’s letter back into the folds of my furs.

“Aramis?” A far-away look on my beloved’s face cast his features into a dark relief against the snowy landscape. “Are you coming?”

“Coming,” he echoed and followed me into the house.

Shedding our many layers, I settled in by the fireplace and stretched out my feet towards the welcoming flames. The tea Grimley had brewed had been black and strong and served with cubes of raw sugar, the way we had accustomed to partake of it in the land of the Czars. The silver cup holder delicately balanced the etched crystal glass and I stirred the sugar into the tea, allowing my mind to wander over the mapped out routes of our anticipated journey.

“It was time we left Russia,” Aramis spoke quietly, his gaze trailing out the window, where in the distance the city of Iași appeared as if a painting on the lid of a lacquered jewelry box. “Fedya was becoming very attached to you. We could have had a potential Alex situation on our hands.”

“Fedya seemed a lot more attached to you than he was to me,” I mused, remembering our friend Dostoyevsky fondly.

“Fedya is not a lover of men,” Aramis smiled.

“Well, neither was Alex,” I stirred my tea, watching the ripples settle around the dark leaves.

“Alex was not my biggest fan,” Aramis’ hand brushed against my thigh. “I wonder whatever became of him.”

I shrugged. If Porthos could not be bothered to keep up with his own offspring, I was certainly not going to be making that effort.

“I wouldn’t waste a thought on him, flittermouse.” The tea sent a shiver of hot pleasure through my limbs, thawing my bones from the February chill.

Aramis smiled with a faraway gaze, a smile that did not reach all the way up to his black eyes. He had not touched his tea to his lips and his hand clenched convulsively around the curved arm of the seat in which he reclined.

“What is it?” I asked. “You’ve been so quiet since we crossed the Dniester.”

“I was just speaking with you,” he replied in a voice like the breath of Boreas himself.

“You were,” I replied carefully, “but you seem somewhere else, all the same. Are you worried about Marie?”

The letters we received in Russia that had been delivered by Zephyrus (who, despite his predilection for Aramis, kept himself aloof and cast distrustful glances in my direction) had become less frequent, but we had nothing sinister to attribute that to. The nymph’s upcoming transformation sounded… routine. Still, something was eating at Aramis, and I couldn't quite detect what.

“Marie?” I was right; his thoughts had been elsewhere entirely. “No.” He placed his tea down without ever having touched it. I watched it slowly cool in his glass.

Outside, the wind howled angrily, beating against the shutters, bringing with it flurries of snow to cover up our latest tracks. Aramis’ ears twitched and his lips turned pale.

“Kotyonok,” I called to him gently. “Kitten, where are you right now?”

“Don’t.” He lept up to his feet, as if pursued by invisible Furies. He looked at me but did not appear to see me. “Don’t do that.”

“Aramis - what?” I took a step towards him, reaching out to ground him with my touch, only to find him drawing away from me.

“It’s too dark in here,” he exhaled, his eyes shooting back and forth between the window and the fireplace. “I can’t… I can’t breathe…”

“Aramis…” I did not know what to do. I had gotten so used to being able to calm him with my touch that, robbed of that opportunity, I felt suddenly bereft and adrift in the howling tempest. “It’s all right,” I tried again, taking a step towards him, keeping my palms at my sides where he could see them. His eyes burned with a fire that I could not identify. “You’re safe.”

A gust of wind rattled the walls of the guesthouse, and, like an animal threatened in a trap, Aramis dashed past me and out the door into the snowstorm.

“Damnation!” I cursed and grabbed one of our furs as I followed him out into the growing blizzard.

The snow-covered hills of Romania surrounded me, silent witnesses to my desperate chase. I called out his name, but the wind returned it to me, spitting it back into my face along with fresh flurries of snow. They clung to my hair and burned against the heated skin of my cheeks. They kissed my lips in a cold, suicidal dash, and died melting on my breath.

“Aramis!”

The oncoming snow was covering up his footprints. In the distance, a wolf howled and the hills resounded with the echo of the lupine call. The Duke of Alameda had been known to have wolf companions, I remembered the story Marion had told me back in our Venetian days. A shiver ran up my spine. _Ares_. No, he could not manifest so far from home. And yet, Deimos, Phobos, and Adrestia did it that night they came to our rescue in Paris. It had been over a decade since I had heard anything of the Olympians. We were in Aramis’ lands now. They would not dare come for him here, they couldn’t.

A wolf howled again and I cursed the winds as I ran towards that sound, relying on it to guide me aided by my own sheer instinct.

My lupine guide did not lead me astray. Soon, the tracks of new paw prints intermingled with deeper grooves from Aramis’ boots as I followed them through a small thicket of pine trees and out to a clearing overlooking the outline of Iași, punctuating the grey skies with the points of her belfries.

“Aramis!”

The wolf was nowhere to be seen, but my beloved stood in the snowstorm, transfixed.

“It isn’t the same,” Aramis had murmured. “It’s so changed. It’s so… I can’t remember.”

“What is? What is happening?” I came up behind him and threw my fur around his shoulders, turning him and pulling him close.

“I’ve been here before,” he groaned against my collarbones. “I’ve… hunted here.” I pressed my lips to his clammy forehead. “So much blood.” He tried to push me away but I held on. “So much _dirt_ in it. Inferior. Inferior vintage!”

“You need to feed,” I said.

“No! You weren’t there! You don’t know! You don’t know the things I’ve had to do!” He tossed in my arms, his hair blown in the wind, snowflakes hanging in clumps from his lashes and the tendrils across his brow.

“You must eat,” I repeated, pulling him closer into my arms.

“ _De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine_ ,” he intoned with eyes glazed over in the frosted air of the forest.

“Aramis,” I brushed the pads of my thumbs over his cheekbones, cradling his face in my hands. “Look at me.”

“De profundis!” He laughed, his fangs flashed in the sombre light of February. “Si iniquitates observaveris, Domine...” His eyes shone with defiance as I tackled him to the snow. “Domine, quis sustinebit?”

“My love,” I pleaded and pressed my lips to his throat, feeling him swallow against my mouth. “Come back to me.” My fingers tangled in his hair as I pulled him into my arms while we both sank into the snow.

“I have been to Iași,” he whispered into the sky, as if challenging it to smite him. “I have been here before, and you abandoned me, Lord.”

“Sweet angel.” I kissed his lips, his frozen, diminutive nose, his eyes with the long lashes that threatened to turn to icicles in the snowstorm. “My love, my Aramis. Come back to me. Look at me.”

His eyes fixed upon mine and his arms wrapped around my neck. His breath scalded my lips.

“Don’t leave me,” his lips trembled against mine.

“ _Never!_ Aramis, never.”

His fingers dug into the back of my skull, pressing our mouths together with a guttural moan. I let his weight push me backwards into the snow. He briefly separated from our kiss and I beheld the naked need in his eyes. He seemed without defenses. I did not remember him looking quite like this since the day we had made love in my abandoned tomb in Bragelonne. I never wanted to see him look this way again.

“What do you need, love? Show me.”

My hands gripped onto his hips as he dug the balls of his feet in the snow and sat crouching atop my body like the incubus of yore he inhabited when we had first met.

“I’m right here,” I said, gripping his wrists and placing the open palms of his hands against my chest. “Tell me, Aramis. Show me.”

His hand tore open the thick wool that covered my chest and slipped underneath the linen of my shirt, resting against my breastbone, feeling my heart as it beat with worry within my ribcage. He appeared to be frozen in the wind, like an ice sculpture, his lips had turned blue. My own must have as well, but I did not care about such things - I knew my own limits. I thought I had known his.

“They buried me in this ground,” a hoarse whisper escaped his lips.

I trembled and my hands slipped up his waist, holding him pressed down against my abdomen. If I could have opened up my body and encase him inside, I would have done so.

“No one will ever bury you again, do you hear me?”

“I’m frightened,” he said, looking somewhere past me.

“No,” I shook my head against the snow. “My chyortik isn’t frightened of anything. I love you, Aramis.”

I pulled and brought him close against my chest again. He allowed me to kiss his mouth; our lips, numb from the cold, still throbbed with life against each other. I knew what he needed, what had always given him strength again.

“Do it,” I demanded, pulling at his hair to coax him up to my jugular.

He moaned, his body heaved like a ship in a storm, then settled firmly into my lap. His teeth pierced my skin and I let out a moan of contentment. My blood poured forth into my beloved’s mouth and my body palpitated with a sudden radiating jolt of heat. His fingers kneaded my flesh as if it was dough under his hands. His hips rocked down against my groin and found myself to be embarrassingly hard.

“Fuck me,” his breath against my ear.

“Yes,” my breath freezing in the air.

“Fuck me,” his hand against the bulge in my trousers. If I lost my cock to frostbite, I supposed I could always grow a new one. I arched up into his touch; his hand was so cold against the heat of my tumescent flesh that I cried out. A lupine howl echoed in reply.

“You’re not prepared,” I moaned desperately, feeling the flesh of his bare hips cooling in the winter air. “I’m going to hurt you.”

“I doubt it,” he said and buried his face in my neck where he could drink from me again.

He rocked back against me, my cock was in his firm grip, and then being squeezed so impossibly tight that I nearly cried out and pushed him off. Instead, I bit my lip and pulled him down over my pulsing cock. Aramis let go of my neck and arched back, his long black hair spilling down his shoulders as a keen alike to that of wild beast escaped his swanlike throat.

“This is real,” he breathed, rocking back against me, grinding his pelvis down against my own until I knew I was fully seated inside him. I watched his eyes roll back into his head and fingers slid and scratched over my chest. “I can feel you.”

“ _Gods_ , Aramis!”

“I can feel you!” His mouth parted, his chest heaved, his hips slammed against mine. Again and again. “Ad te….” He was breathless. “Domine.”

His name fell from my lips in an agonized cry as I emptied into him. He fell supine over me and, in a moment, the flat of his tongue was licking over the wounds in my neck, purring in contentment as I wrapped my arms around him and rolled us both, tugging the fallen fur coat back over him.

“Let me get you back inside.” I pulled him up to his feet and held him pressed to my breast, my lips brushing against his snow covered hair. Around us, the blizzard appeared to subside to a whisper, as if it too had exhausted its faculties upon our frantic lovemaking. At our feet, the snow angels made by our bodies lay surrounded by a halo of my crimson blood.

***

**Carpathian Mountains, 1290**

The men and women who came over the Carpathian Mountains were jagged like rocks, with bones of oak and teeth of iron. Even their skin was tougher than that of mere mortals, for they were the ones who had survived. As the horses, oxen and waggons crawled up the winding mountain path, the travellers watched the dark waters of the river tear through the ravine down below. White ridges of rocks flashed amidst the black forest, and the October winds tossed blood-red leaves through the air.

The waggons and drays were laden with trunks, crates and leather sacks, barrels of dried meat and barrels of pickled cabbage, wine, salt, and double-baked bread. The men in Radu Negru’s entourage rode heavy-set horses and carried sabres, and they were covered in cuir bouilli. Bandits roamed the mountain ranges; neither man nor beast, they were known to feast on flesh and to slash open veins with their talon-sharp nails to drink the blood of the dying. In far-flung caves, the wyvern slept in scaly coils, immortal and indestructible but by the măciucă swung by the Pearl-Born Boy.

The Count of the Székelys, Péter from the House of Bő, rode at the vanguard of the long-winded train. His wife was crouching in one of the waggons that rattled along the rocky road, and every jerky motion of the vehicle sent jolts of pain and fear through her body. Last summer, when Radu Negru had been gathering his followers to accompany him on the conquest of unknown lands, she had lost the child growing in her womb. She had embarked on the journey in the knowledge that she was young and strong and that she and her husband would have children in the country across the mountains.

It had been long after they had set off that she knew she had been mistaken: a child might have died, but there had been another one, and that one lived. It lived and it grew inside her, and she felt its strength when it started to move, as if it had soaked up its twin’s life and fed on it. As the hour of her confinement drew nearer, she prayed to God, in whom they all believed, to grant her a few days more, for she had withered under the hardships of the journey and she feared that she might not be able to feed her son once he was born. It would be a son, she was sure of that.

He would be the first child born in the new township. A scion of the Székely people, in whose veins flowed the blood of many brave races, who fought as the lion fights. Whose heart’s blood, whose brain’s cunning, and whose swords’ might came from the Ugric tribe that had borne down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them; from the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame; from the tribes of Asia and of Africa, who had mated with the devils of the steppe and desert. He would guard the frontiers of these lands with his forefather’s flaming sword in his hand, and slay the infidel Turk, the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, and the Bulgar to protect his own. He would be baptised in the new church that Radu Negru would erect in the heathen land. He would kneel before the shrine that was travelling on a cart drawn by four oxen. In it lay the skull of St. Sabbas the Goth and the holy martyr’s still-bleeding heart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A quick note to translate Athos' latest bout of grossness:
> 
> zaïnka: deminuitive for bunny, literally a pet name like "honey bunny" or "bunnykins"  
> kotyonok: (a male) kitten, purr-purr


	2. The Return of the Native

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Audience, oh Audience! The climax is nigh! Volume 4 is drawing to an end! We hope you'll enjoy the build-up.

**Paris, February 1867**

_The younger of the travellers might be about thirty-two years old, of tall stature, with a noble, handsome face, black eyes, dark-brown hair, a well-cut beard, a somewhat sad but proud look about him – in fact, he was a gentleman._

There was nothing noteworthy about the description of the young Walachian count in Jules Verne’s novel. “ _The Carpathian Castle_ ” would be published in the late 19th century, much to Marion’s and my amusement. “You have made him,” my lover and I whispered to each other as we read the work together, laughing at the way it had all panned out. In our wildest dreams we had no imagined our plotting and planning to play out as perfectly as it had.

I am getting ahead of myself. The years in the convent – they were years of abject misery, and I don’t enjoy dwelling on them more than necessary. My human body was inflamed and all but paralysed, as if the Christian God had decided to punish me for my transgressions. Or perhaps the Old Ones had decided that I had laughed in their faces one time too many and had smote me with an ailment that was as painful as it was incurable, without killing me outright: chaining me to my mortal coil like they had chained Prometheus to Mount Elbrus and sending an eagle to peck at my joints and tear at my nails and skin. At the age of forty, I could expect to linger in my current body for many decades, and the prospect did not appeal to me in the least.

To while away the time while a new body was ripening under my tutelage, I had thrown myself in a tiny little cabal with Marion that was meant to entertain my mind and raise my spirits. I languished in my cell, sipping laudanum and writing long letters to my former lovers who roamed the endless steppe in the East, through the land of the Tartars and the Kirghiz, the Manchus and the Muscovites. It amazed me that Aramis had consented to such a scheme, for I could barely imagine the havoc the Siberian winds would wreak with his hair. (In one of his rare letters, Athos had assured me that the demon bathed his skin in assess’ milk every night, and that the pearliness of his complexion and the lustre of his eyes were as brilliant as ever.)

“You should form him,” Marion suggested one day when she found me reading M. Verne’s _From the Earth to the Moon_. “He’s talented. And he has intriguing ideas about what human ingenuity is capable of. He might need a bit of… guidance.”

It was easier than expected. The author replied to my enthusiastic letter as charmingly as I could have hoped, and a lively correspondence ensued that I found easy to steer. He reminded me of the men I had known in the salons of Paris, when Madame de Chevreuse presided over the fate of kings: keen-spirited and quick-witted, with a modern mindset and the readiness to cast off the superstitions of the forefathers and to turn to science and technology instead. I wrote to Aramis about Jules, teasing him how the “vampyre” was being displaced in modern fiction by the even greater attractions of “technological progress”.

“We saw it happen before, dearest cousin,” the vampyre had written back. “You can’t be expected to remember it, for you were sploshing away in the bed of the Orne at the time, but Mrs Shelley wrote about the thrills and mysteries of science several decades ago. Why do you think _she_ was not afflicted by consumption?”

“ _What would you say, my beloved cousin-german,_ ” I wrote back, smiling, for it pleased me to see that Aramis had not lost his bite in Siberia and that his claw was as sharp as ever. “To learn that your old neighbour M. Hugo has succumbed to the lure of Spiritualism? And it is not just lowly ghosts who grace his table with their presence – nay, it is our Lord Jesus Christ himself who paid the great man a visit! Imagine that! Also, there was an incident with a bat, but I don’t pretend to understand what that was all about. What would you say, my friend? Would you expound oh so knowledgeably the secrets behind planes and controls, correspondences and veridical communications, astral bodies, auras and ectoplastic materialisations? Would you speak of cracking noises produced by the cunning application of an empty tin box, and of moving tables with hooks attached to the medium’s wrists? ‘Smoke and mirrors, Madame,’ I hear you say in those smooth tones of yours, as you bow and smile and kiss a dainty hand with the air of a gentleman from another, less frivolous era.

Come and see me in Paris, Cousin! And bring Discord with you, for I am in need of distractions and amusement. I shall wear a veil, for nothing could induce me to show you and the count the distorted features that mock me from the depth of the mirror, but I shall be glad to see you both in all your glory. You could don your cassock again, M. l’abbé, and stand before me as studious and pious as you once did in the rue de Vaugirard.”

A knock at the door startled me. I folded the letter and called enter.

The girl who stepped into my cell was dressed in the smock that was worn by all convent pupils and was meant to make them look modest and meek. But there was something about this child that had excited my interest from the moment I first spotted her in the crowd. Her hair was lush and glossy, her teeth were straight and white, and even though her body had begun to blossom into womanhood, her skin had retained the clarity of childhood and was almost unmarred by the rashes and spots that usually disfigure the faces of adolescents. Her limbs were unformed and her posture bad, for she hunched her shoulders to conceal her breasts, but those were blemishes that I could easily erase.

“Stand up straight,” I told her. “Chin up. Square your shoulders.”

She obeyed the pull of my voice like a marionette obeys the pull of its strings. She had a pleasant voice when she spoke, more grown-up and mature than her twelve years would suggest. I had convinced Mother Superior that the girl needed elocution and singing lessons. “Talents must be fostered, not buried in the ground,” I had reminded the worthy nun of the words of our Saviour and Christ. “ _Then you should have deposited my money with the bankers, and on my return I would have received my money back with interest! Therefore take the talent from him and give it to the one who has ten. For the one who has will be given more, and he will have more than enough. But the one who does not have, even what he has will be taken from him._ ”

“That’s it,” I told the girl with an encouraging smile. “Much better. You are a very pretty child, my dear, and you’re growing into a very poised young woman.”

“Thank you, Sister Mary Innocentia,” the girl smiled demurely, lowering her lashes, but I saw her eyes kindle with joy and her lips curl just like those of a cat, with dimples tucked away in the corners of her mouth and bespeaking of vanity and sensuality that waited to be awaken. “I’ve brought your linen.”

“Thank you, Minnie,” I smiled at her still, warmly and tenderly, for I had taken a great fancy to this little English girl, whose fate I intended to take into my hands. “Put it in the chest.”

“You have such pretty things!” The little minx sighed; she couldn’t help herself, the temptation of the soft fabric was too strong, her sensuality overwhelmed her. Her small hands caressed the delicate folds of my chemises and drawers. I had come to Petit-Picpus seeking to escape the hustle and bustle of the busy, worldly Italian convent where I had previously lived and where I had not intended to die. So persuasive had my words and my well-filled purse been, so convincing the letter signed by the archbishop, that no questions had been asked. Nothing was known about Sister Mary Innocentia save that she was mad, and that in the world she passed for dead. On those rare occasions when my inflamed joints permitted me to move, I would leave my cell at the arm of my companion Bertha. She would lead me down the corridors, through the door and into the garden, and I glided past the nuns and the pupils without a word, without a breath, like a spectre, like a sheet of water, and wherever I walked, people felt the cold that I dragged in my wake. One day a sister, on seeing me pass, said to another sister, “She passes for a dead woman.” “Perhaps she is one,” replied the other.

“Be a good girl and do as you’re told,” I instructed the child. “And one day, perhaps, you will have the same pretty things.”

She smiled, half-shyly, half-covetous, and closed the drawers.

“Now go and run in the garden, I know that this is what you want,” I said. “I wish I could walk with you, all the way to the stream. You like the stream, don’t you?” She nodded, and I continued. “It is such a beautiful, peaceful place. Sit on the water’s edge for me, Minnie. Dip your hand into the water and let it run through your fingers. Feel its coolness and the comfort it brings. There is something so very soothing about calm, deep water, don’t you think? It washes away the pain and the sorrow, if only one gives oneself away to its embrace.”

She curtsied and dashed off.

In the window enclosure, a spectre stirred: white against white, so still she had been nigh invisible, the ghostly shape of Marion materialised in the shimmer of air, the rearrangement of lines. She had melted into the background, had faded into the whitewashed wall, and she was now reappearing, so vibrant and beautiful that it seemed impossible that the eye could have been fooled into _not_ seeing her.

“You’re filling the poor girl’s head with water, Marie.” She smiled, and I smiled back.

***

**Iași, February 1867**

The snowstorm outside had abated, but the tempest inside my heart still raged on the following morning. Once more, I found myself staring at the page before me, Marie’s letter that called us back. We could not go back. Not now. Not with Aramis like _that_.

The air shifted in the dining room and a glacial breeze cooled the tea in my glass. I reached my hand behind me and Aramis’ fingers curled between my own.

“Morning, kitten.”

I brought his arm around my chest, his chin settled into the groove of my shoulder, his breath tickled the side of my neck. 

“I am well,” he answered my unspoken question. “Thank you for… last night.”

Carefully, I placed my hands around his hips and steered him to my lap. He sat down and caressed me with a covetous stare, his arms wrapped around my neck, and his lips reached for mine. I kissed him with all the warmth and tenderness I could muster, knowing that he would never have asked for it in words, my beautiful prince of the night.

“We need not tarry long,” he whispered. “We never unpacked and shortly we can be on our way to France again.”

“We are not going to France,” I replied, resolutely. Marie’s letter burned the tips of my fingers.

“What are you talking about, Athos?”

“Something is happening to you,” I spoke gently, tracing the veins on his arms with my fingers. “Something really important. And I do not think we should leave until it’s finished.”

“This is ridiculous,” he leapt off my lap. “I’m perfectly well.”

“Aramis, you are not.”

“I am or I am not, what difference does that make? I’m as well as I’ll ever be. And our friend, your _wife_ , Athos, she needs us!”

“Marie doesn’t need us!” I fumed, tossing the letter aside in a fit of rage. “And besides, what can I do for her if I’m there? I am not going to _drown_ someone for her!”

“Why not? You drowned someone for Hadrian.”

Electricity prickled at my fingertips and I clenched the seat of my chair in order to steady myself. Still, blood drained from my face. I looked up at Aramis to find him pale and immobile. He stared at me with black eyes full of fierce defiance and a raised chin that challenged me to contradict him.

I took a deep breath to steady myself. “I did not tell you that story, flittermouse, so that you could use it as a weapon against my weakness.”

“And are you not using my weakness as a weapon against me?”

“Aramis, you aren’t _weak_. You are _unwell_.”

“Then toss me off a cliff, I suppose. That is what you learned to do with the _unwell_ from your friend Leonidas!”

“This is absurd!” I jumped up from my seat, my chair tossed against the wall, and shattering into splinters. “I am not your enemy, Aramis. Let me help you!”

I stretched out my arms, silently praying that he would heed my mute call, and was relieved when I found my embrace full of him. I breathed in his intoxicating scent and felt my resolve grow stronger. Whatever Eumenides had afflicted my beloved, I would slay them all. I would burn down the world to protect him. 

“You are running away from your memories,” I whispered into his hair. “But perhaps instead of running, you should stay and face them. The good and the bad, it won’t matter, for I am here with you. Whatever demons you’re battling, let me battle them too.” His arms tightened around me and he nodded against my clavicles. “Perhaps being here brings up some memories that are unbearable for you, right now,” I continued, glad of finding him receptive. “Perhaps it would be easier if we started with some good memories instead?”

“How will I know?” he asked, lifting his face up to mine. “I can’t recall which places harbor happy memories for me. I can’t even recall my mother’s face.”

I brushed his hair back behind his ear and let our foreheads touch, holding him in place with the barest press of my fingers on the back of his skull. He trusted me. He trusted me to be his guiding light. This time, I would not fail him.

“I know a good place we can start,” I said and let my lips drink in his kisses.

***

That beautiful, generous mouth of his opened under my lips and his hot breath poured into me, making me shiver as it thawed the ice that had glazed over my heart. The inside of my skull was a palace of ice, with tall turrets and endless corridors, and it rendered me dizzy when I attempted to explore it and look behind its closed doors. Athos’ touch, his kisses, the pressure of his cock that I still felt inside me from riding him so desperately last night – they were the pinpricks of light that had guided me out of the grave all those centuries ago when I clawed my way back to the surface in the churchyard of Iași.

Black earth in my eyes, black earth in my mouth, and I pulled back from the kiss, gasping for blood. Around us, the winter winds howled. A squall shot into the chimney, and the fire spat and hissed, cowering under the gust, before it blazed again with red-hot flames. With my hands in Athos’ hair, I tilted his head back. His lips parted, the tendons in his neck and throat tautened, and his skin burst open under my fangs. He staggered back, dragging me with him, and I drank and drank, until the throb of his vein grew weaker and the throb of his cock as it ground against mine through our clothes grew more persistent than ever.

Liquid life, liquid light streamed into my head and when I lifted my mouth from his neck, his breath came in unsteady bursts. “Aramis,” he whispered, his eyes shining with divine light. “What do you need?”

“ _Take me to church._ ”

Centuries ago, when I first wandered the land of my birth an outcast, the restless dead, I had felt nothing when walking on hallowed ground. Once I set foot into a church, my mind was blank and darkness poured into my skull. I cowered in that darkness, and it took me under its wings, shielding me from my own thoughts and feelings – impenetrable, soothing, eternal.

Since I had met Athos, I had learned to shelter in the light. As my strength grew, as I honed my abilities, I had learned to walk on hallowed ground without blackness claiming me.

I walked on my native soil a changed man. I was new, I was different, and the blackness of the grave would no longer have a hold on me.

We arrived in the graveyard at the midday hour: the hour of the upior, of the vrykolakas and the strigoi, who climbs the bell tower at midday and rings the bells for the dead. The blazing light of the sun in its zenith, the pale winter sun that blinded the eye with its whiteness concealed them as well as darkness did: distorting the figures into flickering shapes, into mirages that drifted over the lands, until you turned around and saw them smiling down at you.

Our footsteps were the only ones in the fresh snow. Athos’ shadow fell over mine, and for a moment, we merged into one creature, black on the crisp white snow, with limbs that stretched out endlessly under the rays of the low-standing February sun.

“Do you know where…?” Athos asked softly.

I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes. A murder of crows surged into the white air, croaking their ancient elegy for the dead. My feet walked without my knowledge or guidance; I reached out behind me and Athos grasped my hand. Even through the fur of our gloves I felt the heartbeat in the centre of his palm. With my eyes open or closed: I was blind. Light and darkness dulled my senses equally, and all that remained was the potent pull towards the shadows.

Marie had been wrong: I was not a creature of the night, as her romantic fancy had led her to call me. I was a creature of the shadows, dwelling on the edge between light and dark, between life and death. When I opened my eyes I saw a grave before me, the name of a stranger on the cross that stood above it, and I dropped to my knees, pulling Athos down with me.

“Here?” His grip around my fingers tightened.

“ _Truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh and drink the blood of the Son of Man, you have no life in you,_ ” I whispered. “ _Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day._ It was God who made me what I am, Athos. It was his son Jesus Christ who offered the blood of the Son of Man to be drunk, and I have followed his commandment. _My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?_ ” I exclaimed in sudden agony, throwing my head back to stare into the blinding whiteness of the sky.

His arms were around me, and his hot mouth pressed to my jaw. “I have not,” Discord said. “I will never forsake you, Aramis. I am here, my love. I will always be here. I will kill for you, and I will die for you, and I will give you my blood to wash away your sins. Nunc et in aeternum, amen.”

“Amen!” I replied and pressed my lips to his.

The voracious heat of his mouth scorched me to my very core. “You’re alive, Aramis,” he murmured, kissing me with the same hunger as he had done on the battlefield five hundred years ago. His hands, slipping out of their gloves and pulling off mine, and then our fur coats fell open and I pushed him down into the snow, onto the mound at the feet of the wooden cross. His cock was hard again, and I ground myself into him, into the cradle between his open thighs, panting into his mouth, into his neck, tearing open the vein that I had drained that morning. We were slipping in the snow, and I reached out and wrapped my fingers around the base of the cross.

Athos’ hand under my clothes, fumbling through the many layers, and then his cool fingers around my cock. I growled at the contact, and he hissed, for my fangs dug in deeper into his neck, and my cock in his grip swelled as his blood pumped into me. The air around us crackled with cold. Between us, fire blazed and erupted as we panted, rutted and collapsed in a sweaty, sated heap. The fire had never been doused; the eternal flame blazed forever, enshrined in the tabernacle of his heart and mine.

“His heart bled,” I said, as a sudden memory swooped down on me like a raven.

Athos stirred beneath me. “Whose heart, chyortik?” He was stroking my hair with one hand, for my hat had long fallen off.

“The Saint’s,” I said. “There was a Saint, his heart was enshrined in the church where I’d learned to pray.”

“A holy relic?”

“Yes.”

“Whose?”

“I don’t know. A Vandal’s, I think? A Saxon's? The Transylvanian Saxons, they came across the mountains with us.”

Athos’ hand stilled. “What does that mean, Aramis?”

“I don’t know.” I frowned. “I’ve just remembered. This is what he used to say.”

“Who?”

“My father.”

Athos was frowning, too. “You remember your father?” he asked gently.

“No, I don’t.” I pushed myself up to escape his grip, but he clung to me and didn’t let go. “I was born almost six hundred years ago, Athos. Not everyone has the capacity to retain century-old memories, Son of Zeus.”

“Try millennia-old, Aramis,” he said in the same soft tones. “Millennia’s worth of memories. Everyone I loved. Everyone who died. Everyone whom I’d left behind. You resent Antinous, because I remember him fondly, but I have no choice. I _cannot_ forget him.”

We stared at each other through the mist of our mingled breaths that hung between us like the crystallised souls of dying angels. Athos’ eyes were huge against his pale skin and the white snow in which he lay and where the tendrils of his hair spilled around his head like tentacles. The shadow of the cross fell on his face askance. Under its wing, his eye looked almost black, while the other shimmered in the clear, rich colour of old Armagnac.

“What was your father’s name?” he whispered.

“Péter the Toothed,” I said without thinking.

Athos’ face unfroze. He blinked. “What?”

I lowered my head, frowning and biting my lip.

“Really?” Athos was saying, and I felt laughter build up in his chest. “Are you serious, Aramis? _Péter the Toothed_?”

“I don’t know why I said that.” A door in the ice palace of my skull had been thrown open, and I had caught a brief glance of something. It had slipped away before I could get a hold of it. Like the tail of the wyvern slithered between stones and rocks, slipping through the grip of the hunter who followed its emerald lure.

“The _Toothed_ , Aramis?” He was laughing now, shaking beneath me, and the warmth of his sudden, unexpected eruption of joy swept over me and pulled me down with him.


	3. Footsteps of Fate

**Transylvania, Retezat Mountains, March 1867**

The meandering path that I had followed all my life had been nothing but a delusion: even as it had led me into the depth of the Siberian steppe, through the marshes of the Baraba, to the volcanic islands in the Sea of Okhotsk, it had all the time been a spiral. It had wound tighter and tighter. In the end, I had ended up in the place whence I had sprung almost six hundred years hence.

The further west, the further up we rode on our quest, the colder grew the breath of Boreas, who had followed us from the heart of Siberia and had not let go of us ever since. The icicles of his fingers clung to our skin, like a frozen rod of iron burned into the skin of a man who’s foolish enough to touch it. Before us rose Peleaga, the highest peak of the Retezat Mountains. Like the barber’s blade, the icy breath of Boreas had sliced off the crowns of the trees that grew defenceless on the mountain planes.

A gnarled and twisted shard of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, tucked into a corner of the world where the rational positivism of the 19th century had not yet penetrated. Erdely, the “land of the forests”, or, as it was now known: Transylvania. The land of my fathers.

Memories had started to trickle back. Memories – or dreams, I had no way of knowing. Tartars burning a fiery path through the forests; the pagan Cumans clashing with the men carrying the banner of the Roman Church; the Saxons and the Székely taking the fate of the lands in their hands. My father, the king-maker.

How much did I remember and how much had I dreamt? How much of the knowledge that I possessed was my own recollection of the past, and how much had I implanted in my mind by reading accounts of events that must have happened before my birth?

Athos, who was riding behind me on the narrow mountain path, spurred on his horse and caught up with me. Behind him, Grimley and Bartleby led the mules that carried our belongings.

“Your father will always be Peter the _Toothed_ to me, chyortik,” Athos whispered with a sidelong half-smile. “ _Fogos_ Péter,” he laughed.

“He got that name because he came from _Făgăraș_ , Discord,” I snarled. “Most likely.”

“And because he had beautiful teeth, white and even like pearls.” Athos caught my eye and put a hand on the reins of my steed, covering my gloved fingers with his. “I’m sure it’s true. I’m sure we are on the right track.”

“You can’t know that.” Finding a trace of the man of whom I had no tangible memories had been an impossible task. Athos had encouraged me to follow my first impulse – the impulse that made me say “Fogos Péter” when he had asked me for my father’s name. I did not know where that had come from, but Athos had been relentless. We had ridden to Făgăraș, the place from where Radu Negru had set off with his vassals to found the country of Wallachia. In the archives, we had searched for records of the man whose blood had flowed through my veins, before I had replaced it with the blood of others.

“A bishop, Aramis?” Athos had raised his eyebrows when we found the name Fogos Péter in the records of 1299: _Presentibus Magistro Petro dicto Fogos Comite Syculorum fratre Venerabilis Patris P. Dei gracia Episcopi Transylvanie_. “You do come from ecclesiastic stock, my sweet monkling. No wonder you have always gravitated towards the Church.”

“Blood will out,” Grimley had muttered, poring over 13th century charters with the air of an intrepid gentleman scholar.

“A king-maker,” I said. For if our research had led us to the right place, my father had been the power behind the throne of the fledgling country of Wallachia.

“This might be the place where you were born, Aramis,” Athos had pointed out in Făgăraș, as we stood before Bran Castle, gazing at its tall walls and towers. Within my heart, nothing stirred. No jolt of memory, no veil that lifted in my head to reveal the path to the past.

“I can hardly be expected to remember my birth,” I said. “I did not live here, Athos. Have I not told you that I was educated in a monastery in Buda? I probably never spent any time in Transylvania or Wallachia.”

“They can’t have sent you away straightaway. Not even the Roman Church performs the miracle of teaching infants how to read and illuminate manuscripts. This could be the place where you grew up.”

“I doubt it,” I objected. “Bran Castle was first mentioned in 1377, that was barely twenty years before we met.”

“You remember,” he purred. “I’m glad you retained _that_ memory.”

“It was memorable,” I muttered. The heat of the battle. The silver thread of his scent that had reeled me in amidst the carnage of the battlefield and had kept me tethered to him ever since. The bloodied sleeve. The tent, where he lay fast asleep and beautiful like the Greek god that he was. The thrust of his hips between my thighs as I straddled him to kill and be killed.

“The Teutonic Knights had built a wooden castle here in 1212.” Grimley’s voice, crisp and cool like the air around us. “Perhaps Master Aramis grew up in that one?”

“You’re still here, Grimley?” Athos whirled round, but the Olympian butler was undeterred.

“Yes, Kyrios. I’m always here, Kyrios, as per your Father’s orders and your request, if you remember. I hope Master Aramis’ little memory trouble is not contagious?”

I shivered and reached out my hand for my horse, which Bartleby led to me. “Let’s go, Athos,” I said, leaping in the saddle. “There’s nothing for me here.”

“Are you sure?” He was watching me with dark, serious eyes over the head of my servant, who stood still with his hand on the reins of my horse.

“Let’s _go_.”

We had left Făgăraș. We rode west, towards the mountains and the forests, where the howling of the wolves and the howling of the wind echoed between the naked cliffs in the night. Nothing had stirred in my mind or my heart at Bran Castle. The darkness had not lifted, nor had it pressed down on me with its velvety wings of oblivion and _nihil_. Ever since we had left the ship that had carried us over the Dnieper and I eventually had stepped on my native soil, I had sensed it: the darkness was catching up with me, and in Iași it had almost seized me in its claws and devoured me.

The pagan godlings and demons, the Ancient Ones, those who had dwelled in these lands before the Cross arrived and those who had come in the entourage of the invaders from the east: they had melted here, in this gigantic vortex that sucked in religions and nations and spat them out remoulded and fused. I was the child of the Tartars and the Teutons, of the Romans and the Slavs. I had been born into an era when the dying pagan gods had mated with the rising children of the Cross. In my veins flowed the blood of thousands, and the clamour of their swords and the songs of their prayers reverberated through my head and heart. _To battle!_

“Aramis?” Athos had steered his horse so close to mine that their ears twitched against each other. “Is everything all right?”

“Stop asking me this!”

“You looked like you were miles away, chyortik.” He smiled a pale smile.

“Have you seen Ares lately, Athos?”

The manoeuvre worked. “Ares?” He frowned. “What makes you think of him now?”

“We’re back, and we’re not far from his domain. These are the lands where you used to conduct wars on his behalf. The blood-soaked soil will remember.”

“Will it?”

“Yes.” I urged my horse into a canter. “Blood always does.”

“No, Aramis.” Athos caught up with me. “I don’t believe this is all. Tell me: have _you_ seen Ares? Or any of the others?”

 _To battle_ …

“Not since Kydoimos died.”

The clamour of one thousand swords had died with him. But these were not Hellenic territories. Athos had led Ares here, but Ares had not been the first God of War to ravage these lands. The blood that had soaked the soil was not that of Achaeans, and it was not Hellenic deities who had ruled supreme in the country of my birth.

I had been a Cherub once and an Archangel, wielding my flaming sword like a cleansing flame against the enemies of the Cross. Quis ut Deus? I had returned to the place of my first victories, where I had fed on the fire of scorched flesh and boiling blood. They had given me strength, and I had grown more powerful with each enemy who lay slaughtered by my feet and whose blood poured into me.

I had returned to these lands a God. I was stronger and more powerful than ever. I had slain gods and demons. Divine blood coursed through me. The eternal flame illumed my head and my heart. I was powerful, I was invincible. But just like the gods of yore, the blood-soaked soil of my motherland demanded a sacrifice, and the nihil of darkness was its emissary that came after me to collect its due.

“They didn’t follow us to Siberia,” Athos was saying, still watching me from the side. “That had been your plan all along, hadn’t it, Aramis? Kill one of Ares’ own and go somewhere where Ares can’t follow, to show him the limits of his power over either of us.”

“He was welcome to follow us.”

“To Siberia?” Discord smirked. “Those lands are protected. The old tribes have not renounced their old ways, and the Ancient Ones have not been forced into hiding.”

“Unlike here.” My gaze swept over the Plutonic mountain ridges and the plateaus, all the way to peak Peleaga. The slanted rays of the sun cast deep shadows in the jagged rocks and darkness lurked in the woods on the mountain slopes. Glittering eyes peered from under the branches. Flashing teeth were being sharpened against stones. Wings stretched and claws flexed, rusty after their long sleep in the roots of trees. When the old gods die, they descend to caves under the mountains, to the deepest depths of the eternal forests. They live in the tales that humans tell: stories of innocent maidens trapped by evil forces and of valiant heroes slaying the dragons. Their bodies distorted into something that humans can comprehend, their essence trapped in words that punish and banish the Other. But like Persephone and Poseidon, they can be evoked and woken, and they will return to those who know the right incantation and sacrifice.

In the springtime, the wyvern stirs. When it wakes, it rouses serpents from their winter sleep, for it is their king and they do as it does.

The godlings and wildlings were waking too. For their King of Serpents had returned, and his step called the blood trapped in the soil to the surface.

“With all due respect, sirs,” Grimley’s voice floated up to us. “We should seek shelter for the night. Sirs may be immortal, but some of us have a body that is, to all intents and purposes, human. I would be loath to lose a finger or two to frostbite, for that would mean that I could not serve Kyrios to his fullest satisfaction. Don’t forget, Kyrios, that I’m no longer able to swap my body for a new model, and any damage that is inflicted to this vessel is irreversible.”

“Silence, gnat!” Athos and I both called over our shoulders. “He is right, you know,” Athos sighed. “We must seek shelter in the next village.”

“Unless Master Aramis spots the castle of his forefathers behind the next bend in the road,” Grimley pointed out.

“How would I know if it is the castle of my forefathers?” I shot back. “It’s been six hundred years since I lived in it, and they all look the same.”

“There’s a village nearby,” Bartleby said calmly. “We must leave the main road and take a small path uphill. It’s not far.”

“How do you know?” Athos veered round to stare down at my valet.

Bartleby stared back. “I consulted the map before we set off, count.”

***

**Snagov, April 1867**

Hope as I might, the Retezat Mountains had not unlocked anymore secrets to Aramis’ past. Behind him lay a thick veil which he had been unwilling to draw away. Instead, he appeared to only withdraw more into himself, as if afraid of being scalded by glimpsing something that may have been true.

Despite the fact that in my past lay loss and heartbreak, I had never been afraid to look my origins in the face. But they had been known to me: Hera, Eris, Ares - all my monsters, but my own. I knew their names, I knew what they had meant. Was it the unknown that frightened Aramis most? The unknown was uncontrollable, it conjured up an inner fear, and fear is always worse than the actual, tangible truth. I wanted him to live free of that fear, and of this pain that seemed to have shackled and paralyzed his mind.

In the end, I was forced to accept the fact that we may never find clues to Aramis’ origins. But that did not mean that I could not uncover another memory for him. A memory that I had hoped had been as sweet for him as it had been for me. And, as it happened, we were no more than five hundred kilometers west of the place I had in mind.

The Snagov Monastery rested on an islet, in the placid lake of the same name. I had remembered paying the ferryman the first time I had come here, led by an invisible thread that guided my footsteps, and followed by a muttering, cursing Grigoriy, who yet had a lot to say before losing his tongue in that unfortunate incident that shortly followed. Snagov had been barely a village then, and it was no more so when we had returned.

“This looks…” Aramis started as I held out my hand to help him from the longboat.

“Different?”

“I was going to say ‘respectable,’” he smiled at me, taking my hand even though both of us were well aware that he had not required my aid.

“It was not much to look at, back in the fourteenth,” I admitted.

“It had good baths,” Aramis smiled and pressed his fingers around mine. “Tell me,” he whispered into my ear, pressing close to my body as we stood before the square building of the new monastery, with its triplet turrets poking their crosses into the morning skies. The trees around us had started to bud and there was no ice to be seen anywhere upon the as yet barren ground. The journey south from Iași had caused us all along with the earth to shed many layers. “Tell me what you remember.”

I took him by the arm and led him towards the steps of the church.

It had been shaped about the same around the foundations, but with a domed rooftop. I remembered, it had smelled of incense, which in itself had not been unusual, but there was something peculiar about this smell that struck me as foreign, a scent other than frankincense and myrrh.

“Lavender,” Aramis smiled. “I remember now. The local monks had added lavender oils to the incense mixture.”

“On Mount Athos, we used aromatic wood,” I said, avoiding his eyes, knowing how little he liked being reminded of my time there. “But lavender, that… seems downright sybaritic, flittermouse.”

“It wasn’t my idea,” he pushed playfully against me.

“How can you be sure?” I teased and pressed my lips to his ear. “Chyortik has always been fond of exotic fragrances.”

“And you, my friend, have always had a predilection for _aromatic wood_.”

“Oh touché, lastochka!” I laughed and halted my steps along the pews to examine our surroundings.

The golden, Byzantine mosaics smiled benevolently down upon us. I had paid them no heed when last I was here, for I had not arrived to gaze upon the glory of the Nazarene god. I had come here in chase of a demon.

“It was here,” I said, looking down the apse towards the altar. “It had been middle of the night but the door to the chapel had been left wide open, almost as if someone had done so on purpose. It had struck me as an auspicious omen then.”

Aramis had let go of my hand and walked on steadily towards the flagstones at the foot of the altar. A soft light fell from the stained glass window and cast a kaleidoscope of a colorful glow over his long hair, almost like a halo.

“It was dark,” I went on. “Only the candles at the altar lit up the tabernacle. It had been smaller back then. Only bare benches and nowhere to comfortably kneel except the stones upon the floor.”

“I had been praying,” Aramis whispered.

“I wasn't sure what you had been doing,” I admitted, “but you certainly did clutch that rosary in your hands as if your salvation depended on it.”

“How did you find me?”

“I do not know.” I had not known back then either. My own will had guided me. “I followed Mircea’s army at first. And then - a hunch.”

“A hunch? That is not very reassuring.”

“I also found you in Chartres,” I said quietly. “That was… unexpected.”

With the colors refracting around his pale face, he looked himself like one of the angels on the golden icons that smiled down upon us from the walls of the chapel.

“You had not come to kill me here,” he said. I saw his lips tremble and I took a few quick steps towards him to take his hands into mine.

“You know I had not.”

“Go on. Tell me what you remember.”

I remembered the door ajar, the candles lit ahead of me, a figure in a cowl kneeling before the disturbingly distorted visage of Jesus on a rudimentary, wooden cross. The crucifix looked tarnished from having been subjected to too much smoke and incense. For some time, I had stood there in mute wonder, knowing that my journey had been at an end, and that I had not bathed and put on a clean shirt in vain before coming to this place.

“You looked terrified,” I admitted. “I was terrified too.”

“I could not tell. You seemed very self-assured.”

I smiled and pressed his hand to my breast where my heart beat the same way it did all those centuries ago when I had found him again right here, in the Snagov monastery.

“You looked up at me and you were even more beautiful than I remembered. You had a look of eternity about you. I thought that I could look at you forever and never grow tired of it. I had been right.”

“How could you?” he asked, pulling me down onto the flagstones, so that both of us knelt before the altar just as we had back then. “After all you’ve been through. After all you’ve seen. How could you ever want to love again?”

“I was lonely,” I confessed. “And tired. And tired of being alone, Aramis.” I saw the tip of his Adam’s apple appear and disappear beneath the white stretch of the skin of his neck while he swallowed. “Besides, I had not intended on loving you,” I smiled and directed my eyes down towards the flagstones, like the perfect picture of a penitent.

“I thought you had a look of a hunter about you then,” he replied, his hand caressing my chin. “And yet, you let yourself get snared.”

“I have never regretted it, my love.” I took his hand and brought it to my lips with reverence.

“Not even in Paris?” he asked in a trembling voice.

“Aramis…”

“Not even in Chartres?”

“Not even if it kills me a thousand times…”

His arms wrapped around my neck and his mouth interrupted my heated declaration with a kiss that was suffused with both hunger and sweetness, in a way that only he could ever kiss me. Unlike the smell of frankincense and myrrh, his innate fragrance had never faded.

“You let me kiss you then too,” I whispered, still breathing softly into his partially parted lips.

“I remember,” Aramis exhaled and closed his eyes again, waiting for my mouth to find its way back towards his.

***

  
The stones upon which I had knelt six centuries ago swayed under my feet. Athos’ mouth was gentle and tender against mine, and his beard that Grimley kept elegantly trimmed was short and soft. I closed my eyes and summoned the image of the warrior-god from the recesses of my mind, of Athos as he had first appeared to me: the fine lines of temple, brow and cheekbone framed by dark hair that curled against the pale skin and the dark penetrating eyes, staring into me as if he could read my souls. The grip of his hands around my hips had been firm and confident when he held me against him on the cot in his tent, and the same hands had roamed my body in bold strokes as he conquered me, forever.

Athos pulled back from the kiss and the puff of his breath alighted on my lips like a prayer: “You’re so beautiful… Gods, Aramis, after all these years. You’re still as beautiful as ever. No, you’re more beautiful than ever. You’re glowing, chyortik. Glowing with divine light.” His lips trembled, not quite a sigh, barely a smile, and he looked at me as if he beheld me for the first time.

“Does that surprise you? I have your blood running through my veins, my pagan idol,” I whispered. It has been a long time since I had fed on anyone but him. On our voyage across the Dnieper, I had not wished to decimate the hands and souls on deck. We had journeyed through Wallachia and Transylvania for a few weeks, but the blood of plebs deemed me less palatable than ever.

Athos took a half-step away from me. The ancient heathen smile lit up his features, and his eyes darkened. He opened his coat and tugged at his cravat, watching my face as I watched his. His hunger matched mine.

“You’re welcome to more, Aramis,” he said. “It’s yours. Always.”

And he tilted his head back, raising his eyes to a fresco of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and his long pale throat curved and beckoned.

His hands were on my hips again as I threw myself against him and tugged at his hair, forcing his head further back, forcing the tendons to strain almost to snapping point. Forcing a groan out of his throat as my teeth clenched around the reverberating flesh in the spot where the thud of his blood was most potent. It throbbed against my tongue and his skin broke, sending a torrent of ichor into my mouth. Athos twitched against my groin, as hard under his clothes as I was under mine. An inexhaustible source, like an enchanted well that would spout divine nectar for as long as we both should live.

_Forever._

“Forever.” An echo, a whisper, a sigh that rose to the vaulted ceiling, reverberating between the soot-stained walls. _Forever-ever-ever-ever._

I pushed him against the altar, and he groaned. Liquid life in my mouth and my head. I knew it well, and yet it was a shock as it blazed through me like electric current, blinding me, opening me up until I was nothing but living nerve, and he rubbed me raw and soothed me at the same time.

I fell down to my knees. Athos towered above me, one hand in my hair. With the other, he clutched his neck, and blood as dark as richest burgundy trickled from between his fingers.

When his breeches fell open under my fingers, I saw the outline of his cock under the white linen. It was damp already; where the dark patch blossomed, the fabric had become translucent. I wrapped my fingers around the hard length. It lay like a rod in my hand, heavy and firm, and inside it his blood thudded in time with the frantic beat of his heart.

I leaned in and pressed my open mouth to it. The sweetness of blood and the salt of his sweat dissolved on my tongue, and I swallowed the blend greedily. I nipped at the linen with the tip of my fangs, and Athos moaned. Above my head, his blood was still pouring out of the wound, and when I pressed my forehead to his stomach, the pulse of his abdominal aorta reverberated against my skull.

Athos let his hand drop with a pained groan. Blood trickled from his fingers down onto the white slab upon which I knelt. My fang snagged in the linen and a tear appeared, wider and wider as I pulled at it with my teeth. The hot damp flesh of his cock heaved under my mouth and I parted my lips and wrapped them around it. My tongue pressed against the throbbing vein, I closed my teeth, slowly and carefully, around the hard sides at the base, until Athos’ knees buckled and the hand in my hair convulsed.

“Oh fuck you demon slut _fuck_!” he spat out a disjointed stream of expletives. Inside my mouth, trapped between my teeth, his cock twitched and swelled as blood filled it to bursting point.

I let go of it, and it sprang free, ramrod hard against his stomach. Athos clutched my hair and yanked my head back. Sweat-soaked hair and dark eyes, and blood so rich it almost looked black in the twilight of the chapel.

“You demon,” my God whispered with swollen lips. “My angel.”

I opened my mouth, panting, and licked along the blue vein all the way to the tip of his cock. It was slick and salty and I sucked it in, savouring the taste of his arousal. Savouring the sight of his eyes: larger and more liquid than ever as he watched me suck his cock on my knees in the house of the Christian God.

“Touch yourself.” Another tug of my hair, and my hand flew to my groin. I moaned and pushed my cock into my fist. Athos lifted his bloodied hand to his neck, scooped up fresh blood, and then wrapped his hand around his own cock. He thrust into my mouth, pushing his fingers in alongside, nails scraping inside my mouth, and the flavour erupted on my tongue. Inside me, the fires of Hell were raging, devouring me with their infernal flames as I devoured Athos with my mouth and my senses. He came in a torrent that flooded my mouth, panting my name. Even as the world around me was spinning, Athos dropped to his knees and pushed his tongue between my lips and teeth.

He was fucking my mouth with his tongue, while his hand found my cock and squeezed and pulled, hard and fast, and I spilled myself clinging to him with both my arms.

“Aramis,” he whispered huskily after we had collapsed on the white slabs and lay spread by the altar like a pagan sacrifice. “I’m still bleeding.”

I pushed myself up and he turned his head, presenting the fountain of blood to me. I pressed my face into the crook of his neck and lapped with the flat of my tongue, lapped at the edges of the wound, teased the punctures with the tip of my tongue, until the flow stopped, the well dried, his skin closed, and Athos’ erratic breath evened. I kissed his skin, so hot and wet under the layer of fresh blood, and then I kissed his mouth again: that generous, beautiful mouth that opened for me, like it always did.

“I love you,” I murmured in the tongue of my childhood. The words that I had spoken to him in that winter night when we had fled from Malbork: they were sacred to me, and he treasured them in his heart.

Above us, the vault ceiling seemed to lift, like it had done in Vaux two hundred years ago above the head of the king, for a sudden gust of light streamed over the spot where we lay. Athos’ chest heaved beneath me and his hand lifted from where it had rested on my back. I felt him grope around.

“Our coats,” he murmured. “Where…?”

“We dropped them there-” I gestured vaguely, and Athos’ body flexed beneath me and he shifted us both, wrapping us into the discarded furs, and we rolled on the cold ground, away from the white, blood-stained slab and into the darkness.

Had we slept? I couldn’t tell. I blinked, and when I opened my eyes, Athos’ lashes fluttered.

Something in the texture of the air had changed. We both felt it: the new presence, lurking just out of sight. Something golden gleamed under the linen of Athos’ shirt, as if the Achaean armour flickered into existence, and something other than the fur coats lay wrapped around our bodies. I recognised the mantle of Discord.

A dark figure crouched on the white slab at the feet of the altar. Its back hunched, its head bent, its elbows jutting out like the wings of a bat. It was sniffing the ground, swaying its neck to and fro, its face obscured by a long curtain of black hair. It breathed out frosty air and sucked it back in. It traced the outline of Athos’ fingers that had imprinted themselves in blood on the stone.

Athos and I rolled apart, arms stretching, fingers flexing to grip our discarded weapons. The stale cold of the tomb hit us both: we both knew it well.

The dark figure lifted its head. A ray of light slashed across the waxen face, the high aquiline nose, the red lips. Black eyes, like hollow wells, pointed at Athos and me.

The red lips parted revealing sharp teeth. A sound escaped the blood-red mouth: the croak of a throat and tongue unaccustomed to human speech.

“ _Tata_?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _lastochka_ \- means 'skylark' in Russian (gross)  
>  _Tata_ \- means 'father' in Romanian


	4. The Carpathian Castle

**Snagov, April 1867**

“Tata?” the creature emitted, the incongruous syllables falling from his blood-stained lips.

“Oh no,” Aramis drew his sabre from the scabbard.

“Wait,” my hand alighted on his wrist. I took a step forward and the creature, the man, unfurled to his full height and his nostrils flared at my approach. “Where did you come from?” I asked, reverting to the version of Church Slavonic that Aramis and I had spoken to each other when last we were in Snagov.

“Tatic!” A long, desiccated hand shot out towards me and I saw two perfectly pointed fangs drop from his upper jaw.

In a flash, Aramis had positioned his body between us, his sabre raised over his head in a fashion that broached no alternate interpretation of his intent. “ _He’s mine_!” Aramis threatened in a voice both sonorous and feral.

The newly arisen chyort folded over where he stood, bowing deeply and with apparent sincerity before the two of us.

“Forgive me, my Fathers. I have risen from beneath,” the man spoke, straightening out again and looking at us both head on with the air of one used to being obeyed. “Where I feel I have slept for some time.”

“But who the devil are you, finally?” I asked, once again placing my hand on Aramis’ shoulder, forcing his sabre to lower.

“My name is Vlad of the House of Drăculești, Voivode and Prince of Wallachia,” he replied with a curt bow and his eyes sparked with a proud flame as he pronounced his name.

“You are Vlad Țepeș?” Aramis asked with a snarl.

“Darling,” I whispered, “he wouldn’t know if he’s Vlad Țepeș. They didn’t go around calling him that to his face, did they?” Aramis scowled at me. Behind him, the Impaler’s nostrils flared again and his eyes fixed upon my exposed neck. He licked his lips. “How long have you been a…” Once more I wasn’t sure what to call it. “A revenant,” I concluded, settling on using my own name for chyortik-kind.

“ _Blood_ ,” the risen prince pronounced and Aramis once more lifted his sabre aloft.

“Let me cut off his head, Athos.”

“There is always time for that, Aramis.”

“Aramis?” the Impaler’s head cocked to the side and for a moment he resembled a well-trained spaniel. Whilst distracted with his compatriot, he did not appear about to charge me, which gave me the opportunity to examine him closer. Judging by the remnants of what the self-professed Prince of Wallachia had been wearing and how he smelled, I had to surmise that he had freshly burst from his grave. “I know that name - Aramis. It is the inverse of Simara,” the Impaler chortled and tossed his long hair back. “Simara was told to have been a demon warrior in my grandfather Mircea’s army.”

His words fell like stones at my beloved’s feet, whilst I still tried to put it all together.

“Vlad the Third was said to have been buried here, in the Snagov Monastery,” I finally muttered. “He had met a violent end, did he not?”

“What do you know of the demon Simara?” Aramis had asked, lowering his sabre.

“It was a myth,” Vlad shrugged. “There was a warrior in Mircea’s army named Aramis, who was fierce as a demon, fast as lightning, and deadly as the plague. They said he was a nephew of Radu Negru himself. He would have been a relation of mine, had he survived.”

“Had he survived?”

“No one knows what had become of him. He was never seen in Wallachia again in my day.” And then he added slyly, “Until now?”

“Oh gods, Aramis,” I whispered, grabbing his hand, my mind suddenly grasping at the events quite clearly. “We have done this! We have risen him!”

“As for cutting off my head, Father,” the Impaler smiled a preternatural smile flashing us a row of glowing teeth, “the Turks had already seen to that once. As you can see, it did not stick.”

“It was my blood that raised him,” I whispered into Aramis’ ear. “He had been buried right under the altar and we… we…”

“Fucked and bled on top of his grave,” Aramis completed my thought.

“Need _blood_ ,” Vlad repeated taking an involuntary step towards me again.

“Don’t you _dare_!” Aramis hissed.

“Down, boy!” I commanded the fledgling vampyre, who cowered before us. “I know you’re hungry, but you can’t just… Well, you can’t eat me.”

“You smell delicious, tata,” Vlad grinned from ear to ear, the points of his fangs poking out from beneath his full upper lip. If I was being entirely honest with myself, Aramis’ possible relation was a rather handsome specimen. Perhaps not surprisingly.

“Ugh, and stop calling him that!” Aramis exclaimed with disgust. “Athos, please tell me this isn’t going to turn into another d’Artagnan situation? I’m not coparenting a strigoi with you!”

“Aramis, look at him.” I grabbed my beloved by the shoulders and turned him to face the bloodsucking abomination standing before us. “I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but he is your kindred, he is just like you. _And_ he says you’re related to him. This… this strigoi might be the answer we’ve been looking for all along!”

“He is _not_ like me!” Aramis bristled.

“He will be once he feeds and bathes and we get him into some new clothes,” I pointed out. “Besides, we raised him from his grave! As of this moment, it is my blood that powers him. He is our responsibility, whether you like it or not.”

“You have always said that if you had a son, you may have named him Vlad,” Aramis sneered.

“Truly, tatic?”

“Stop calling him that!”

I laughed but had to choke off my laughter into a feigned cough due to a scathing look Aramis had treated me to.

“And whom do you propose we feed to him? Bartleby or Grimley?”

“Well, I was going to say we go grab one of the monks, but Grimley isn’t off the table either.” Vlad of the House Drăculești gave me a look full of love and longing. “Aramis,” I lowered my voice again, “we _hatched_ him! We can’t just leave him!”

“We can kill him, like we killed the vrykolakades on Santorini,” Aramis whispered back.

“Sweetling,” I brushed my thumb over his lips, “you’re not thinking clearly.”

“Tata,” Vlad bowed again. “Uncle,” a second bow towards Aramis. “I, Vlad Drăculea, solemnly swear to love and serve you both for this gift of life you have bestowed upon me. Only teach me, and I will prove myself to be an able student.”

“Don’t believe him, Athos,” Aramis whispered, dragged me to the side. “Do you remember when Vangelis was going on and on about how vampyres have a puerile brain? Well…”

“Aramis, we’re not just leaving a resurrected Vlad the Impaler running amuck in the Snagov Monastery!” I whispered hotly back. “I am very well aware of your feelings on so-called coparenting, but this one is on us. Now, be nice to your nephew!”

“You will pay for this,” Aramis breathed into my ear and bit my earlobe with his front teeth.

“Come on, young Vlad Dracula,” I smiled and extended my hand to the revenant. “You must be going insane from hunger. Let’s go find you a nice monk or two to eat.”

***

I left the chapel first, commanding Athos and his new pet to stay behind. It would not do to parade the revenant around in this state. As I stepped over the threshold, the sun had disappeared behind the mountains, and its red glare bathed the sky in a sea of blood.

Grimley and Bartleby stood where we had left them, each silent and motionless like the statue of Antinuous. Grimley was holding a hare by its ears, and the animal struggled every now and then. I motioned them over, and they obeyed.

“The count and I have met someone,” I said. “Get us a monk.”

Grimley’s impassive gaze strayed to the door of the chapel.

“Why are you holding a hare, Grimley?”

The faithful retainer looked at me. “It could have been chased by dogs into the chapel. They mauled it, hence the blood.” He paused briefly and I could have sworn he sighed like Atlas must have sighed when the weight of the world was lowered onto his shoulders. “How much blood is there?”

I showed him my teeth. “Go and see for yourself.”

Athos’ valet disappeared, leaving Bartleby alone with me. “What kind of monk?” The leprechaun asked.

“Not too old,” I said, fixing my gaze at the ridge of the snowy mountains, which were glowing red like the skeleton of a freshly butchered corpse. “He should be in the prime of life and be an important member of the community. Not some lowly minio-” I stopped and frowned. What was I saying!

I looked down at Bartleby. “A novice. As young and unformed as you can find. A gangly, callow youth who is the lowest of the low in the monastic community.”

Bartleby nodded and turned to go. As I watched his back, the image of my first mortal emerged from the depth of my memory: the man whose blood I had drained after he had killed me had been a warrior. A nobleman, a kinsman of Theodore Laskaris himself. A powerful man, whose blood was suffused with potency and virility and rage. I had drunk it all in, and with each swallow, my veins, my body, my heart filled with the strength that had once led his arm and the vitality that had once powered his brain. I had departed from his chamber a stronger man than I had come: driven not merely by my thirst for vengeance, but also by a vitality that I had never known before. He had whetted my hunger for power and I had fuelled it ever since. The blood of many powerful races flowed through my veins. The blood of many powerful men flowed through my veins.

The blood of a god flowed through my veins.

“Wait!” I called after Bartleby’s retreating back. “Not a youth. Not _one_. Make it two.”

I did not watch Vlad Dracula take his first meal. When he left the chapel, his face was no longer waxen and his eyes no longer hollow. Athos had thrown the mantle of Discord over his shoulders, for Dracula’s burial shroud was hardly appropriate attire for the time of year. Dracula bowed to me with a half-sly, half-shy smile, and Athos put a hand on his shoulder, beaming like he used to do when his parrot had learned a new word or d’Artagnan had learned a new trick.

“We _will_ have to get you another dog,” I told my lover in French.

***

“Are we there yet?” Vlad of the House of Drăculești, former Voivode and Prince of Walachia and the latest in the long line of nuisances whom I was not permitted to dispose of at my leisure, bounced on the steed that Athos had equipped him with.

“Patience, young man,” Discord admonished. I could tell that the deviant had meant to say ‘my son’, but he had bitten his tongue just in time (which was fortunate, because otherwise he would have forced me to bite it for him).

“In my day, the Ottomans were saying that in future steam-powered carriages would pull us across the mountains!”

“Steam powered carriages have not made it all the way to Wallachia yet,” Athos explained patiently. “They do exist in other countries, most notably in England.”

“I should love to go there!” Vlad exclaimed. “It must be an exhilarating experience to dash through the snow pulled by a magnificent fire-spitting metal dragon that never tires. Why, they must go at thirty miles an hour!”

“Eighty!” Athos told him, as befitted an early shareholder in Mr Stephenson’s Rocket and an investor in the Ruse-Varna railway line. The latter had been commissioned by the Ottoman government, built by William Gladstone’s company, and sniffed out by Bartleby in good time. I flashed my fangs at the surrounding countryside. It had taken Athos a few decades to reconcile himself to the fact that he lived off the money generated by commoners and upstarts. But in the end, he was won over by the fact that our funds appeared to never run out, thanks to Bartleby’s prescient investments.

“Eighty miles an hour, never tiring,” Vlad sighed. “When can we go to England, Tatic?”

My fangs tingled and the light above the horizon turned red.

“You have to learn the modern ways first, Vlad,” Athos explained. “A lot has changed between the fifteenth century and now. Take it from me: it gets more and more difficult to leap back into the fray and assume your rightful place in society. You are a prince of, ah, blood. You must maintain the honour of your name and your house. Princes and monarchs come and go, but their names live forever.”

Not surprisingly, the former ruler of the House of Drăculești had wished to go to the castle where he had once lived. “You can’t simply walk in and claim Bran Castle as yours again, my s- friend,” Athos had said. “It has passed into the hands of others, and it is inhabited.”

“By mortals,” Vlad pointed out.

“We can’t kill them all.” I ground my teeth, and then caught Athos’ eye. “Yes, all right, we _could_. But we’re not going to. You have to learn restraint.”

Athos’ eyebrows shot up. Behind me, I felt Grimley’s eyes bore into the back of my skull like red-hot arrowheads.

We were riding towards the Retezat Mountains again. In March, I had sought for traces of my ancestors in their remote castles and among their peaks. There was nothing there for me, but we had found a place that was perfect for hiding an unskilled strigoi until it was fit to be let out on humanity. Unless he met with an unfortunate accident first, which was always a possibility in those derelict dwellings on jagged cliffs.

Dusk was falling when we arrived in the village where we would spend our last night before annexing the castle. We had ascertained on our previous visit that it had been in the hands of the family of the Count von Fulger, who had ruled over these lands since time immemorial. They had fertilised the soil of the Transylvanian provinces with the blood of Hungarians, Saxons and the Székely, and their names have been passed down from fathers to sons in the doïnes sang in the mountains for many generations. Their heraldic motto was the famous Wallachian adage: _Da pe maorte_ , _Give unto death_ , and give they did. Their blood had flown freely in their fight for independence: fierce warrior blood that they had inherited from their Roman ancestors.

The latest Count von Fulger had left long ago to follow the lure of love to Italy. The mysterious count, freshly returned from his European travels, took possession of his ancestors’ place – what could be more natural? It did not harm our plight that the castle was haunted by a fearsome Chyort and that none of the locals approached it for fear of feral creatures of the night dragging them down to Hell, lock, stock and barrel.

The King Matthew was an inn that had served decent robber steak - bits of bacon, onion, and beef, seasoned with red pepper, and strung on sticks and roasted over the fire - and Tokay wine that did not turn anyone’s stomach. With his usual blend of English reticence and bullying, Grimley procured us the necessary rooms, and the landlady crossed herself at the sight of Dracula’s gleaming eyes and our warlike appearance and shooed her daughter out.

“This is a very provincial place,” Vlad sneered. “These are all peasants. And I’m hungry.”

I sighed and began to mentally prepare a letter to Marie, in which I intended to include a posthumous apology to the late Dr Vangelis, who had so often held forth about the vampyre’s child-brain. It seemed that the good doctor had been right in one respect.

“Don’t look at me like that, chyortik,” Athos said later in our chamber.

“Like what?”

“Like you wanted to eat me.”

I opened my mouth to show him my teeth, but he took the opportunity to push his tongue between my lips, with his hand around my waist.

“I will not be cajoled, count!”

“Oh yes you will,” he purred, his mouth silky on my jaw, under my earlobe. The brush of his soft beard raised goosebumps on my skin.

“Why do you always have to pick up strays?”

“What do you mean by ‘always’, Aramis?” His mouth travelled lower and he tugged at my cravat with his teeth. “Once, that happened. And that was over two hundred years ago. May I remind you who picked up Marie and Marion?”

“They are much less annoying than either of your pets.”

“Oh really? That’s not what you were saying about Marie twenty years ago.”

“Athos, for the love of-” I snarled, for his hand had snaked between my legs to cup me through my riding breeches.

“What, chyortik?”

“Stop calling me that. You sound like a Transylvanian peasant.”

He laughed and pushed me on the bed. The hot weight of his body smothered me into the eiderdown, and I choked and gasped for air, clinging to Athos with all my limbs and many of my teeth. The blood in his neck throbbed beneath his skin. “Do it,” Athos whispered, lips moving hotly against my skin.

“ _He_ will smell it if I do.”

“Oh you evil chyortik!” he half-groaned, half-laughed. “No wonder the locals fear your name!”

I slapped his arse. His hips jolted into mine, and then, with one hand in his hair and the other around his waist, I rolled us both over and straddled his hips, wrapping my legs around his to immobilise him. Athos was laughing still, his breath hot and urgent as it hit my skin, and his cock was so hard I fancied it would tear through the fabric of his breeches like a spearhead.

I leaned in and licked the sliver of flesh above his cravat. “I’m not going to bite you.”

He groaned. “Please, Aramis.”

“You will have to take it dry.”

“You bad, bad chyort…” His hands tangled in my hair, and sparks erupted at his fingertips, singeing my skin and my hair.

I bit down on his lower lip. “You’ll pay for this.”

“ _Make me._ ”

Fingertips trailing around my skull and down my neck, nails grazing my skin, divine energy sizzling and crackling before, behind, between, above, below those roving hands of his. Each of the tiny lightning bolts baptised me with its sharp sting, and between us, heat rose in a heady cloud.

“My god,” I whispered, unable to help myself.

“Mmh…” he murmured. “I believe my divinity has manifested itself.” And he ground his groin into mine.

“You will have to learn how to control yourself,” I admonished him, my fingers busy unbuttoning and unfastening, until that magnificent body lay open to my gaze. I dragged my palm down his chest, nails-down, and Athos gasped and bucked like a stallion that I was about to break. My nails caught in the hairs on his chest, making him hiss as I yanked at them, and his eyes were glued to my face, his gaze locked with mine, and the flames of Olympus smouldered in those dark depths.

“Take your clothes off, Aramis.” A soft command, spoken in that mellifluous voice that shot straight to my groin. He smirked. “ _I wish it_.”

I lay naked in his arms, cushioned by his embrace and lulled by the throb of his heart that reverberated through his ribcage into mine and made my lips tingle. My mouth roamed his chest, along the curve of his collarbone and back down to his nipple which I took between my teeth and rolled gently. He yelped, and the sharp sting of pain at the back of my neck could have been a nail that dug in or an electric spark that shot from his fingers into my spinal marrow. My hair spilled over his torso, ghosting feather-light over his skin to make it shiver. His cock rubbing against mine, huge and damp and pulsating with life. At last, at last, I snaked one hand into the moist heat between our bodies and curled my fingers around it.

“Oh yes, please!” he moaned, and I lifted my head and pressed my mouth against his, trapping long tresses of my hair between our lips and teeth. “You’re so beautiful,” he panted when we broke apart. His eyes kindled and burned into me, and his hands cupped my face, fingers traced the contours of my temples and jaw, and his thumb dipped into my mouth. I sucked it in and bit down at the knuckle, and Athos’ eyes widened and then shut.

“Come here,” we both whispered at the same time, falling into each other’s arms. His palm slid all the way down my back, and he grabbed my arse and squeezed, pulling me open, dipping a finger in, pulling me so close into the heat of his body that my breath left my lungs and I clung to him lightheaded and dizzy.

He was teasing me with his fingertip, until I ground my teeth and pushed back, impaling myself on his waiting digit.

Athos’ hand withdrew. “ _You_ won’t have to take it dry, Aramis.” His voice was a husky purr that reverberated against my throat. “Where is the-”

I was quicker. The vial with oil was in my hands and I poured it over his cock, massaging it in with both hands, and then with my groin as I spread myself on top of him, rubbing and rutting against him with my teeth at his collarbone and his mouth in my hair. His hands on my arse, opening me up for him, and then I sat up and lowered myself on his waiting cock. Athos gasped and threw his head back, watching me with half-lidded eyes. I took him in slowly, gently, angling my hips until sparks of lust erupted deep within my groin. My cock jolted and Athos flicked a thumb over the moist tip and carried it to his lips.

“Fuck me, Aramis.” His fingers closed around my hip bones, pulling me down and holding me still, and I felt the beat of his pulse deep inside me as his cock filled me out.

“I’m trying to,” I muttered. I propped myself up with one hand against his chest and thrust the fingers of the other hand into his mouth. “Jerk me off, Athos.” I jolted my hips and he groaned, hand shooting to my cock. “Make me come on your prick.”

The iron grip of his hand on my hipbone tightened, while the other hand moved up and down my cock in slow, smooth strokes, following the rhythm of my hips. I rode him with flat slides of my pelvis, and then I peeled myself off him and plunged back down with a hard slap of flesh against flesh.

He let go of my hip and weaved his fingers through my hair instead, brushing it back from my face, pressing his wrist to my mouth. “Take my blood.”

“ _No._ ” I rose up on my knees and slammed down on his cock, and we both cried out.

“It’s yours.”

“I know.” I nipped the inside of his wrist with my front teeth. My fangs tingled and my nostrils flared, and the blood inside my veins heaved in time with his. His hand shot painful sparks of Olympian fire into my cock. It hurt, and I closed my eyes and let pain claim me as the celestial flames immolated my body and cleansed my soul. Beneath me, Athos shuddered and climaxed, mangled anathemas and professions of love spilling from his lips as he spilled himself inside me.

***

We left the King Matthew at the break of dawn. The ghostly grey of the early morning faded and made way to a blinding white and gold, as the rays of the early sun forced their way through the mist that clung to the jagged rocks like cotton wool. The band of villagers sent us off under mutterings of “ordog”, “pokol”, “stregoica”, “vrolok” and “vlkoslak”, pointing in the direction of the castle to which we were headed and crossing themselves like widows during Easter Mass. It had taken Grimley’s negotiation skills and a surprisingly large portion of the pot of gold that Bartleby had found at the newly-founded Manchester Magnesium Company to hire fresh horses that would pull the cart with our household gods to our new abode.

Our lackeys had used our stopover in Vulcan – a place named after the wolf, or vlk, rather than the Roman god - which we had passed en route to the Retezat Mountains, to procure all that was necessary to live in relative comfort in a Carpathian castle ruin for an extended period of time. With his usual disregard for earthly luxuries, Athos had affected phlegmatic indifference in all matters but the acquisition of wine, of which we purchased several crates, as well as a healthy supply of slivovitz. I, on the other hand, had no intention to sleep and fuck in mouldy sheets and have my meals cooked in copper pots coated in the green patina of centuries and insisted on equipping ourselves accordingly.

The cart with its precious cargo hobbled along the sloping road that wound like the vertebra of a serpent around the mountain. Atop the pile of our possessions sat a claw-foot tub in which I intended to have a bath every night, Grimley’s mutterings and curses notwithstanding.

A dog began to howl after the sun had reached its zenith and rolled over on the other side of the sky. The melody was picked up by other voices, more long-drawn and feral than those of domesticated canines, and the horses’ ears twitched. Rolling clouds obscured the sun and their shadows chased each other on the mountain slopes like prehistoric behemoths. We kept on ascending in a spiral that wound round and round like the steps descending into the Circles of Hell. By the time the red rays of the sun set the world aflame, the driver was pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the blazing sky.

The peasants whom we had hired to unload the cart were crossing themselves and kissing the crosses that they wore around their necks with a fervour that even I, a man who had entertained hopes of being Pope, found excessive. One or two wore garlic wreaths around their necks, and I made a mental note to write Marie about it, for it would give her great pleasure to learn that hers and Marion’s fairytale had made it all the way into the heart of Transylvania.

I saw Vlad chase the men with his gleaming eyes as they slaved away, dragging our trunks, crates and coffers through the castle gate and into the rooms pointed out by Grimley. Meanwhile, Bartleby was setting up a tripod in the courtyard. Athos and I had initially been wary of my lackey’s interest in photography, but we decided to indulge the leprechaun as long as he refrained from photographing either of us. Secretly, we both admitted that it was _nice_ to keep mementos of places where we had once lived. The flash of the magnesium ribbon sliced through the evening air like a lightning bolt, and screams echoed inside Wuthscheid Castle as peasants panicked. With cries of “Chyort! Chyort!” they ran into the courtyard and straight into our arms, like chicklets seeking shelter under the mother hen’s wings.

I counted them quickly. One appeared to be missing, and I was about to send Bartleby to look for Vlad and interrogate him, when the peasant boy appeared in the door. Athos caught my eye, smirked and shook his head.

Wuthscheid Castle, our new home. We moved in, we had a bath, we baptised the new linen with blood. The corridors were draughty and antique silver lamps lighted the rooms. The table service was of gold, and so beautifully wrought that it must have been of immense value. The curtains and upholstery of the chairs and sofas and the hangings of our bed were of the costliest and most beautiful fabrics, and they must had been of fabulous value when they were made, for they were centuries old. They were not unlike the baldachin over our bed in Paris, but they were worn and frayed and moth-eaten and I had Bartleby replace them with something that did not reek of mould and decay.

In the library, we found a great number of books in various languages, all of which were as mouldy as the curtains. I had Bartleby chuck a great many of them into the fire, and he replaced them with the ones we had brought. Among the new volumes were the tragedies of Shakespeare, despite my misgivings about the effect Titus Andronicus would have on Dracula's juvenile brain, several novellas penned by our St. Petersburg friend Fedya, a very poorly researched novel by Alex, which both Athos and I sneered at, several huge volumes titled _Les Misérables_ by our former neighbour M. Hugo, and _De la Terre à la Lune_ , a fanciful story by Marie and Marion’s latest pet project, Jules Verne. “M. Verne is very interested in technology and travels, my dear cousin,” Marie had written. “I have been sharing excerpts from your letters with him – nothing compromising, of course, I think you know you can trust me to know when to hold my tongue. He liked your accounts of your journey to the end of the Eurasian continent very much. He especially enjoyed your description of Discord slaying a Siberian bear armed with nothing but a hunting knife, and skinning it to make a fur coat for you – which I am sure suited you admirably.”

“Now, young Vlad,” Athos had said, steering our charge around the library with a hand on his shoulder. “You want to know about the world outside your home country. I suggest you read these books. Aramis and I will help with the languages and teach you how to speak English and French. And then,” Discord added with a glint in his eye. “Uncle Aramis will teach you to dance.”

***

  
**Wuthscheid Castle, Transylvania, May 1867**

“Tatic?”

“Oh, for the love of… How many times have I told you _not_ to call him that?” Aramis growled and the mirrors around the dining room trembled.

“What am I supposed to call him, Uncle Dearest?”

“You may call him _the count_.”

Vlad turned a disarming smile onto Aramis and I bit my lip to prevent my own grin from creeping into my features.

“Would _the count_ care for some fencing this afternoon?”

“Don’t mind if I do, Vlad,” I responded, avoiding Aramis’ eyes that stared at me with such concentration as to attempt setting my hair aflame.

“This better not be some ploy to make him bleed so you can sniff him!” Aramis hissed. “I’m onto your tricks, Dracula!”

“Uncle, this world you have brought me back to is a desultory place in which one is truly wanting for worthy companionship,” he sighed and moved his chair closer to mine. “And it is becoming increasingly more difficult to find virgins,” he pouted, drawing infinity signs with his finger upon the side of his glass.

“Why are you looking for virgins?” I asked, glancing at Aramis askance.

“Uncle Aramis told me that after god-blood, their blood is the purest, and the most delectable.”

“Aramis said that, did he?” I cast an accusatory look towards my beloved. “Well, I imagine he’d have his reasons for saying so.” I gave Aramis a barely perceptible shake of the head, if only to let him know that I was onto _his_ tricks, as well.

“Convents!” Aramis suggested with alacrity and stabbed his carving knife into the very center of his quail. I treated him to another dubious look.

“He’s right, though,” I said to Vlad as we stood facing each other with swords in hand, “you should not be calling me ‘daddy.’”

“Not even if I call you _batyushka_? I understand that is a perfectly acceptable way to address your elder beyond the Dniester.”

“You’re a grown man, Vlad. You once ruled this whole country. There’s no reason to infantilize yourself.”

“And you are a three thousand year old god: a little fact that might supercede our superficial age difference.” His retort was not one I could easily evade and so we crossed blades in the courtyard whilst the afternoon sun illuminated the high walls of Wuthscheid Castle. In truth, I was grateful for the exercise.

Night fell, and with it a foggy peace descended over the mountaintops, punctuated only by the occasional howl of a wolf in the distance or a screech of an owl mid-flight. Carpathia and its scattered villages slept underneath us. I had been seated in the library, writing to Porthos, in an attempt to set down the events of the previous months with as much detail as I could dare render to paper. I had no longer trusted the Anemoi to bear our correspondence, and the human post was renowned for its unreliability. I ran my fingers over the back of my head, noting my hair was beginning to grow long again. My quill wavered over the page, the flame in the lamp flickered and died, and I yawned.

“Does the Kyrios require a light?” Grimley apparated with a newly lit oil lamp.

“Thank you, Grimley,” I rose from my chair. “I think I’m done for tonight.” He lit my way into the hall. “Where is Vlad?”

“Hunting, sir.”

I contemplated this. “And Aramis?”

“At his toilet with Bartleby.”

“Perhaps we’ll have a quiet night after all,” I smiled, taking the lamp from the Grigori.

“Kyrios, far be for me to give you advice…”

“But I see you shall have to, against your own better judgement?” I laughed.

“Kyrios, has it occurred to you that you are, in fact, raising a revenant with your demon lover, who, incidentally, has not been the picture of mental health in the past few months? In an abandoned castle in Romania?”

“Which part of that narrative do you object to most, Grimley?”

“At least he is polite,” Grimley responded with a resigned eye roll. “The revenant,” he quickly added, “not your esteemed consort, obviously.”

“Be careful, Grigori,” I scolded. “You might lose your tongue again, and what will happen then? You won’t get a new vessel this time!”

“Only the other day, I was saying the same thing to Master Vlad,” Grimley continued chattering as he walked me to our rooms. “Monsieur Aramis threatened to cut out his tongue because he called you ‘Tata’ and I said, ‘My prince, you better do as he says! He is not one for idle threats, that one!’”

“This is all a very touching story, Grimley.”

“I know, Kyrios,” and pressed his hand to his heart with a curt and impertinent bow.

“Good night, Grimley,” I said, attempting to keep from laughing at his perpetual expression of stoic exasperation. I admired his stamina and tenacity, for all his lip.

“Good night, sir.”

Inside our bedroom, I found Aramis seated by the dressing table, amidst a collection of fragrant unguents and exotic oils. Behind him, Bartleby stood armed with an ornate ivory comb held artfully aloft over my beloved’s lustrous, black hair.

“Bartleby, you’re dismissed,” I said.

“I was not yet finished, count,” the leprechaun glanced from me to his master.

“You’re finished,” I replied, my heart and loins kindled with the fire of beholding Aramis’ reflection in the mirror. He eyed me with simmering looks and the smallest smile hiding in the corner of his lush mouth that sat so smartly beneath his little nose, like the bloom of a wild rose.

I extended my hand, and Bartleby had placed the comb into my palm before bowing courteously to us both and taking his leave. I stood behind my beloved, letting one hand come to rest over his shoulder. Where his cambric shirt had fallen open around his neck, a glimpse of his skin beckoned me with enticing warmth and I let my thumb caress over the exposed surface.

“Chyortik looks…” I could not complete my thought. My lips failed me, my tongue dried up in between my teeth as if I had beheld him anew for the first time. In the mirror, his eyes kindled with a playful fire.

“Do you not know how difficult it is for me to maintain myself in these climes? And at such altitude?” He attempted to chide me, but his voice was thick with lust.

I brushed his long hair from his shoulder and took the tresses into my hand, letting the silky strands fall through my fingers. “I am perfectly capable of finishing what Bartleby started. I’d hate for you to retire to bed all tangled up, my sweet flittermouse.”

He laughed and craned his neck back, letting my hands and the comb travel across the plush, glossy waves of his raven hair. I leaned over to place a quick kiss to the center of his neck, right over his Adam’s apple, and he hummed underneath me.

“Comb this through,” he pushed a jar of oil towards me. It carried the familiar odor of almonds.

“Has it started to grow on trees yet, zaїnka?” I teased, pouring a bit of the oil into my palms and then running my fingers over his tumbling tresses.

“We are no longer destitute, like we were when we lived in Poland,” he smiled, meeting my eye in the mirror. “Which is good because you have never stopped being an utter profligate.”

“Don’t I always take care of my chyortik?” I asked, picking up the comb again and stroking it through his shimmering, almond-scented locks.

“You definitely _are_ a natural caretaker, I’ll give you that,” he smirked and I pulled on his hair with just a touch of roughness to expose the side of his neck so that I could press vengeful kisses to the warm skin and tendons there. A soft moan greeted me in response and then I wrapped my arms across his chest, dragging him from his stool and away from the dressing table. “You’re a monster,” he gasped into my mouth as I assaulted him with ravenous kisses. “An utter barbarian… An unrepentant… heathen… curr.”

“You’re purring again, kitten.” I bit his lower lip and pushed him backwards onto our bed, climbing over him and straddling his hips. Underneath my body, his own undulated like the waves of the ocean. “Let’s see if we can make you roar.”

I pulled his shirt over his head, leaving his wrists tangled up in it while I admired the exposed planes of his arms, chest, and abdomen. My fingers traced the ridges of his bones and muscles and my lips trailed in their wake over the warm, supple skin. I drew my chin over the delicate skin of his lower abdomen, letting my beard tickle him before I plunged my tongue into the enticing dip of his bellybutton. Beneath my fingers, his flesh heaved and he cursed softly as his legs wrapped around my shoulders and held me pressed to him.

“So beautiful, my kitten. You taste so good.” My lips traveled down the downy trail that ran straight to his cock, where it already shot up towards my face like a hoisted lance. “I need to taste you, Aramis,” I exhaled a hot breath over his hard flesh and parted my lips to take him in…

… When the door to our bedroom sprang open and three young women in various states of undress ran screaming and giggling into the room and threw themselves upon our bed.

“Oooh!” the banshees squealed. “It’s a game! Play with us! Play with us!”

“Hands off, you cock-hungry hussies!” I leapt into the air and grabbed a pistol from one of the drawers, pointing it at the intruders.

“Vlad said everyone in this castle was beautiful!” one of the crazed whores exclaimed and attempted to lunge herself at Aramis, who only just managed to cover his cock up with a nearby pillow.

“You must play with us! We must all play together!”

“Vlad!” I shouted, besides myself with rage. “Get your bloody jezebels out of here!” Only in retrospect, I was beginning to remember that the touch of them would no longer be disastrous. They were no more welcome for that fact.

“Why must your pets always be the cause of most grievous coitus interruptus, Athos?” Aramis turned to me with eyes full of despair.

“Oh, there you are, you naughty minxes,” Vlad staggered in, wearing only his nightshirt, which was more brown with blood stains than it had ever been white.

“Vlad, how many times do I have to tell you not to play with your food?” I scowled at the fledgling vampyre, still pointing the gun at the disheveled maenads. Only then was I beginning to notice puncture wounds on all of their necks from which small streaks of blood trickled down over their heaving bosoms.

“Oh come on, _count_ ,” he grinned at Aramis for approval, “I have them firmly in my thrall. They won’t be virgins for much longer, you know.”

“Oh, sweet mother of god,” Aramis cringed. “Your son is embarrassing!”

“ _My_ son?” I squirmed. At that precise moment, Vlad broke out into a melancholy song of old Wallachia, and I lowered my pistol, gracing Aramis with a smirk of much complacency. “ _My_ son, you were saying?” I wrapped my arm around him, sitting back down upon the bed.

“You owe me so many filthy sexual acts,” Aramis whispered as Vlad and his trio of enthralled harlots roundelayed out of our bedroom and I could finally lock the door.


	5. The Devil's Elixirs

**Wuthscheid Castle, Transylvania, July 1868**

The air of Carpathia was ripe with the odor of picked fruit and sounds of buzzing bees, the errant symbols of immortality that have graced coats of arms for millennia. Even in the mountains, slopes covered in the purple hues of heather, they buzzed and carried pollen on their heavy bellies that defied gravity, oblivious to the true immortals who walked across their lands.

In the villages below, maidens carried jugs of milk and baskets of freshly picked fruit, their hair tied back in braids as thick as the roots of a willow. Unlike bees, they paid us some heed, especially when the sunlight would caress my beloved’s long hair which they eyed with equal parts envy and admiration. Then their mothers would shoo them inside, leery of the Count von Fulger and the company he kept, mouths gaping as if to catch flies, and their eyes big and dark like the local heifers’.

It was here that the fair Snježana lived. Young and pure as the driven snow, just as her name implied. Or so Vlad was constantly going on about.

“Snježana, with her skin as white as snow! And her braids as black as the night sky! Do you know how hard it is to find a girl as sweet and pure these days, Fathers?”

“You have an utterly unhealthy obsession with virginity, Vlad,” I had told him. “I don’t know if it’s because you’re a product of your time or… your diet.” I cast an accusatory look at Aramis who merely smiled at me with both rows of teeth.

“Uncle,” Dracula veered towards Aramis, “when will you teach me to turn into mist?”

“What on earth would you need to do that for?”

“So I can sneak in Snježana’s bedroom at night, of course.”

“Vlad, no!” both Aramis and I cried and cringed simultaneously. Then Aramis continued, “The countryside is full of young, buxom maidens. What are you fixated for on that one?”

“She looks just like my Ilona.”

“I only have your word for it,” my beloved shrugged and looked to me for help. I shook my head and pretended to be busy adjusting my stirrups. I had never seen my wayward charge’s dearly departed wife, but I doubted she looked much like the village girl of his obsession.

“Do you think she is my Ilona returned to me?”

“That’s unlikely,” I muttered under my breath. Perhaps that could have been a conversation to have with Osiris, but around these parts, the gates of the Underworld did not strike me as the permeable kind.

“Village girls, Vlad?” Aramis teased. “Think of their inconstancy! She probably has a shepherd boy as a betrothed already. Waste not a single thought on the fair Snježana. We should find you a countess.”

“Oh! Snježana would never be untrue to me!” Vlad went on, casting lovelorn glances towards the village from the mountaintop of our castle’s keep. “Snježana lost! Snježana infamous! Ah! Uncle, that idea is much more cruel to me than Vlad abandoned - Vlad unhappy!"

“What the hell is wrong with him?” Aramis hissed into my ear.

“I don’t know, but it really is quite embarrassing,” I whispered back.

“Well, perhaps he’ll kill himself,” Aramis suggested with an eye roll.

“You don’t mean that,” I chided, giving his pert behind a quick slap with my hand. “For god’s sakes, Vlad,” I returned to the wayward vampyre, who should have really had a better grasp on humanity by now, “Had she been betrothed to you, you might have some room for these histrionics. But as it is, she barely even knows your name. You’ve spoken to her once when she dropped her basket and you picked it up, to which she replied ‘Thank you, sir’ and you style yourself wretched and betrayed because you cannot turn to mist and molest her in her sleep?”

Behind me, Aramis snicked with barely contained glee. Before me, Vlad Dracula pouted and hung his head.

“Be a man, Vlad,” I added. That adage always seemed to work for me when I was living my first millennium or so.

That night, Aramis and I were returning to Wuthscheid Castle after a successful mountain goat hunt, when my beloved’s batlike hearing made us both halt in our progress at the doorway to our bedroom. Inside, having peaked in carefully, we found Vlad, who had been tiptoeing around the room, apparently engrossed in the act of fluffing our pillows.

“Vlad!” I entered the room, terrified at the implication. “What are you doing? Did… did you eat the servants?”

“We told you not to eat the servants!” Standing at my side, Aramis folded his arms over his chest.

“I did not eat the servants,” Vlad replied, calmly smoothing his hand down the counterpane. “I merely wanted to make sure you were comfortable in my castle.”

“Our castle,” Aramis corrected him.

“Whatever you say, Uncle.”

“That’s…” I searched my vocabulary for the right word. “Sweet?” Aramis glared at me.

“Don’t touch the bed,” he pointed from the bed to the young vampyre. “Go now… Go… stalk Snježana in the village. I don’t know… Go be some place not here.”

I followed Vlad out with a pitying look and a hidden smile of inexplicable fondness.

“He loves us, you know.”

“Nonsense, Athos. He is incapable of love.”

“It might express itself in a rather juvenile passion, but he isn’t incapable of it, Aramis. Come now, give the boy a break!”

“You deviant,” Aramis snarled, pressing his chest against mine and sniffing me as if to discover some hidden scent lingering upon my skin. “Have you indulged this juvenile passion of his?”

“Oh, come off it, flittermouse.”

A loud knock on our door startled us at the very moment of the dropping of the proverbial ragefangs. Reluctantly, Aramis and I drew apart.

“Enter.”

“Sirs, I’m terribly sorry to bother you,” Bartleby, in nightcap and candelabra in each hand, stood in the doorway. “But the villagers are here, with torches and pitchforks.”

“What do they want?”

“They want the bloodsucking abomination who they say resides here and deflowers their maidens and sups on their blood.”

“Perfect. Hand Vlad over…”

“Aramis!”

“Oh for fuck’s sakes!” Aramis drew his sabre and headed out the door. “Honestly? Really? Don’t they have better things to do, Athos?” as I followed in his wake. “Don’t they have butter to churn, fields to till, sheep to herd?”

In the hallway, our way was blocked by a dour-faced Grimley.

“I would counsel sirs against slaughtering the villagers. Too much visibility.”

“Then tell them to go away, Grimley!” I commanded, beginning to feel a tingle in my palms and the press of my armor against my skin. The last thing we needed was for my divine power to be witnessed by dozens of pitchforked plebeians. 

“No, wait,” Aramis sheathed his sabre, his fingers playing upon his chin as he contemplated something. “We just have to explain to them that there is no such thing as a bloodsucking abomination. I’m a doctor, I can fill their heads with nonsense about the dangers of hereditary hemophilia.”

“What about the weird noises and lights that they claim they hear coming from the castle every night?” Bartleby asked, joining us.

Aramis blushed and I couldn’t hold back my laughter anymore.

“Tell them they are made by modern appliances,” Aramis snapped. “You, Bartleby! Show them the magnesium ribbons you use for your photography.”

"Should I not better hit them over the head with my shovel, Doctor?" 

At that moment a pathetic screech resounded over our heads followed by the wild beating of the wings of a trapped bat, attempting to find egress into the open air.

“Did Vlad actually learn how to turn himself into a bat?” I inquired. Aramis greeted my question with a stony look. 

“Fine,” he exhaled a sigh of resignation. “I will bedevil all of them to make them go away myself.” Grimley and Bartleby bowed and made way for Aramis towards the heavily bolted door. “But I still think the mechanical appliances cover story is a better idea.” 

“Be careful, my love,” I called out to him.

“Stay back, Athos,” he smirked. “We don’t need another witnessing of the thunderhands.”

“Bartleby, you should get the shovel just in case,” I whispered aside to the leprechaun, while Grimley, mute like a statue but steady as the North Star, stood next to me and handed me a loaded musket.

The door opened, Aramis took a step forward with both arms extended in the fashion of the Bishop of Vannes. Silence fell upon the plebs, followed by the angelic tones of my lover’s voice. 

“Listen to me, Christ’s children.”

***

The little unpleasantness notwithstanding, it seemed to me that the villagers considered coming to the castle a fine sport, their peasanty version of a chasse à courre. Young men would dare each other to stalk us, young women would gather nuts and berries in the woods surrounding the castle, and everyone was perfectly happy with this state of affairs, as long as the villagers were armed with crosses that hung visibly around their necks and Dracula did not defile any maidens in broad daylight. Grimley had engaged the innkeeper to send a supply of perishables and take care of our laundry once a week – for, as he had said, playing the mysterious, aloof count in a remote castle is all well and good, but somebody has to ensure that there’s food on the table and that the horse stables are mucked out on a regular basis. “Unless M. Aramis teaches us all how to turn into mist or bats that don’t require human nourishment, as per Master Vlad’s request, we will have to purchase goods in the village,” he had said, and that was that.

Fortunately, our strigoi pet had turned out to be more studious than I’d expected. When he was not roaming the countryside in search for buxom maidens, he sat in the library. Under Athos’ tutelage and mine, he had managed to acquire passable French language skills, and he positively insisted on being taught English, as his obsession with that country was as fervent and puzzling as his obsession with virginity. As for the latter, he appeared to equate the fact that a woman’s vagina had never been in contact with a man’s cock with an almost otherworldly purity of spirit and soul. I, on the other hand, remembered all too vividly the many brides of Christ whom I had met as the Bishop of Vannes. Meekness, obedience and goodness were not among the most prominent characteristics of the abbesses I’d had dealt with in my professional capacity, and I could not blame all of their toughness, negotiation skills and remorselessness in pursuing their convents’ objectives on the state of their vaginas.

“Listen to this, Uncle!” Dracula told me one day, looking up from the thick volume which he had been devouring lately, and he quoted a lengthy and rather stomach-turning passage from M. Hugo’s _Les Misérables_ : “ _One may, in a case of exigency, introduce the reader into a nuptial chamber, not into a virginal chamber. Verse would hardly venture it, prose must not,_ ” the hypocrite had written, treating us to a detailed and intimate description of Cosette’s toilette.

_It is the interior of a flower that is not yet unfolded, it is whiteness in the dark, it is the private cell of a closed lily, which must not be gazed upon by man so long as the sun has not gazed upon it. Woman in the bud is sacred. That innocent bud which opens, that adorable half-nudity which is afraid of itself, that white foot which takes refuge in a slipper, that throat which veils itself before a mirror as though a mirror were an eye, that chemise which makes haste to rise up and conceal the shoulder for a creaking bit of furniture or a passing vehicle, those cords tied, those clasps fastened, those laces drawn, those tremors, those shivers of cold and modesty, that exquisite affright in every movement, that almost winged uneasiness where there is no cause for alarm, the successive phases of dressing, as charming as the clouds of dawn,—it is not fitting that all this should be narrated, and it is too much to have even called attention to it._ "

“She sounds just like my Snježana!” the love-struck vampyre exclaimed.

"Your Snježana or your Ilona?” I asked.

"Ah, Uncle, they are one and the same, for is not my Snježana my Ilona returned to me?” He glanced over at Athos, who was reading one of Shakespeare’s tragedies for the umpteenth time and pretended not to listen to our conversation. “Our love was such that it would outlast centuries. Surely _you_ understand?”

I stood up. “I’m going for a walk.”

Athos looked up. “Where are you going, mignonet?”

"I have a mind to take up my thesis,” I said. “To this end, I have to contemplate chapter eighteen of St. Augustine once again, which I intend to do while taking the air.”

"I never took the Jesuits to be a contemplative order, M. l'abbé,” the Greco deviant said, his eyes kindling.

Dracula was looking from me to him and back again. “The French language sounds most beautiful when you speak it, count. Uncle.” He bowed to each of us in turn.

I showed Athos my teeth. “The Jesuits were keen students of demonology, my dear count.”

"But you will return to us later, Uncle?” Dracula begged. “I have made good headway with the family tree, I wish to show it to you. Your name doesn’t appear in any records, but I believe your mother was a sister of Radu Negru.”

I bowed curtly and left the room. My heart was beating fast, and my teeth and fingers tingled. Had I had Athos’ powers, I fancied that sparks would be flashing at my fingertips.

Outside, a large bird of prey swooshed past, momentarily obscuring the loophole with its wings. Its call echoed between the rocks and walls, and I blinked.

A church being built. The calls of men and beasts intermingling, harsh German syllables uttered by the Saxon settlers and the braying of donkeys that carried the stones uphill. A shadow passed before the sun, and down on earth, people lifted their heads and shielded their eyes; some sank to their knees, crossing themselves.

'The wyvern,’ the whispers rose. ‘We have disturbed its sleep,’ they muttered, blinking up to the growing tower, upon which the Christian cross would one day be placed. ‘The serpents are coming. Blood must be spilled.’

"The serpents are coming,” I muttered, clutching at the stones that framed the window enclosure.

My mother, a sister of Radu Negru. There would be no record of her name, the memory of her was lost in the mists of time. I shut my eyes and sniffed the balmy air with its familiar scents of woods and charcoal fires. The church rose towards the sky, and I stood gazing, my hand clasped in the hand of someone much bigger than me. My father perhaps, but when I looked up, all I saw was the glaring sun and the cross that cast a deep shadow over the place where my father’s face should be.

The only face I remembered was that of Popă Alexandru: he had looked at me reborn, and he had told me my name. My real name, not the name of the demon Simara that had survived in the tales whispered in candlelight. He had pressed a rosary into my hands, and he had baptised me with a sign of the cross: ‘ _Aramis_ ’.

His last blessing had been mine, as had his blood.

I entered my room and took out the key. I fetched the rosewood casket and slid the key into the lock. I smiled. I opened the hidden drawer, and then the one behind it. Inside it, curled like a sleeping serpent, lay Popă Alexandru’s rosary. I traced the edges of the wooden cross, chipped with age, and ran my fingertips over the ancient beads that held so many of my prayers. Next to it, wrapped in a monogrammed handkerchief, was the severed finger of Athos. Suddenly, one of the vials that I stored inside the drawer caught my eye. I picked it up, holding it up to catch the light. It was empty.

I bit my lip, frowning, attempting to remember when I had last seen it, last held it. It must have been decades ago, for I had not opened the rosewood casket during our journeys in Siberia. I prodded the stopper with my finger; it appeared to be rather loose. Further investigation inside the drawer revealed a stain in the lining. It must have trickled out.

I rinsed the vial, put it into the front drawer, and washed and dried my hands. Just in time, for the door opened and Athos came in with a bundle of papers in his hand.

"How’s the contemplation going, M. l’abbé?” he said in French.

I raised my eyebrows. “Splendidly.”

"I’m glad to hear it. Look at this, chyortik.” He held the papers out to me. “It was in the copy of _The Sorrows of Young Werther_ that you encouraged Vlad to read.”

A smile escaped me, but I caught it almost in time. “Romantic poetry? Or suicide notes?”

Athos was shaking his head in amused disapproval. “You naughty fiend,” he purred. “But no. Why do you think is he obsessed with drawing worms?”

I perused the sketches. “I think they’re lizards. These are supposed to be scales, I believe?”

"Hm.” Standing behind me, he rested his chin on my shoulder and wrapped his arms around my waist. “You may be right. I think these are legs. But why lizards? When did Vlad become a naturalist?”

"They don’t look very natural to me,” I muttered. “You can’t even really tell what they are.” _The serpents are coming._

"Dragons, I believe, sirs.”

Grimley had stepped over the threshold, carrying fresh water and towels to replace the old ones at the washstand. “Master Vlad has developed a pronounced interest in dragons lately. I understand he favours the draconic motif in the design of his outerwear and armour.”

“Your son,” I told Athos sternly, while his chin dug into my shoulder and his soft beard tickled my neck, “is weird.”

“He’s your flesh and blood, chyortik,” Discord purred.

“Hardly,” I said primly. “Even if he is right and we share an ancestor: so many generations down the line the bloodlines are diluted. Trust me on this. But oh! you wouldn’t know about diluted bloodlines, would you, Son of Zeus?”

Athos nipped at my jaw, and Grimley cleared his throat. “Master Vlad has many interests,” he pronounced with a voice that seemed to be coming out of a grave. “Do you know, Kyrios, that he has moved from his bedroom into the old chapel and has taken to sleeping in a coffin? On naked soil; at least that spares me some laundry.”

“You don’t do the laundry, Grimley,” I said. “You hire a washerwoman to do it.”

“Why does he sleep in a coffin?” Athos manoeuvred me so that we both faced the mirror. It its silver depths appeared the face of his infernal, eternal valet.

“I’m sure I don’t know, Kyrios.” Grimley squared his shoulders. “Is that all, Kyrios?”

“Aramis?” My lover’s eyes met mine in the mirror.

“Hm, I don’t know,” I said slowly. “Maybe he was dead for so long that he got used to it.”

We looked at each other, until another throat-clearing from Grimley startled us.

“Is that all, Kyrios?”

“Yes. No! Wait: do you know if Vlad has anything to do with the lights and noises? The ones that scared the plebs?” Athos looked at me again and added, “He has become secretive lately, I don’t have an explanation for his behaviour.”

“I believe your son is growing up.”

Athos grimaced, but his eyes smiled.

“No, Kyrios, I don’t know anything about lights and noises. I sleep with earplugs, Kyrios.” Grimley’s gaze trailed from Athos to me and back. “If it’s not Master Vlad, it must be the castle itself. I hear old stones groan under the weight of centuries.”

“Oh go away, Grimley!” Athos waved an elegant hand and then brushed a strand of hair away from my face. “I would have thought as the official butler of this place, you would know all its secrets.”

Grimley bowed. “I shall attempt to acquire the requisite knowledge forthwith.”

The door closed behind him and Athos and I looked at each other again. “It can’t be… you know,” my lover said, and I could have sworn that he blushed. “Us?”

I bit my lip. “I doubt it. We’re not so very loud, and these walls are thick. And your hands don’t _always_ shoot sparks, my thundergodling.” I traced the outline of his thumb with the nail of mine. “No, count, I believe it is more likely that they were startled by Bartleby’s flash photography - and by his experiments with the phonautograph. He claims he can make it _reproduce_ the sounds that it records. I believe he made Grimley sing and recorded it, gods help us.”

Athos threaded his fingers through mine and released me from his embrace. “You’re probably right, chyortik,” he said, pressing my hand. “Come. Let us have a look at Vlad’s chapel. And then we can go in search of Bartleby’s laboratory.”

A heavy door guarded the entrance to the old chapel. It creaked, but we pushed it open without much effort, and followed a stone passage to a circular stairway, which went steeply down. The stairs were dark, being only lit by loopholes in the heavy masonry, but Athos had brought a candle. He reached for my hand as we descended, and the touch of his fingers was warm and comforting. At the bottom, there was a dark, tunnel-like passage, through which came a deathly, sickly odour, the odour of old earth newly turned. As we went through the passage, the smell grew closer and heavier. At last, I pulled open a door which stood ajar, and we found ourselves in the ruined chapel. We had visited it months ago, after we had moved into the castle, and had seen that had been used as a graveyard. The roof was broken, and there were steps leading to vaults, but the ground had recently been dug over, and the earth placed in great wooden boxes. Dracula must have had them delivered by the villagers, for they looked new and solid. There was nobody about, and we walked through the room, looking into the vaults, where the dim light struggled. In two of these, we saw nothing except fragments of old coffins and piles of dust; in the third, however, I made a discovery.

I whistled, and Athos appeared by my side. There it was: Dracula’s lair. A coffin filled with earth, and next to it a candlestick and pile of books. Athos picked up several of the volumes, his eyebrows raised. “The London Directory, the Army and Navy Lists, the Law List, and a Flying Dutchman timetable,” he read the titles. “It looks like Vlad is serious about England.”

“Tell him about the food,” I advised him. “He will soon change his mind.”

“Why _England_?” Athos said with the sad and baffled air of a parent whose child throws away a good education. I took the books from his hands and put them back, and then I wrapped my arms around him and kissed his cheek.

“He’s not really your son, you know that, right?”

“Hm. I know, chyortik.”

“Where is Vlad? Did you leave him in the library?”

“He left before me.” Athos pulled back from my embrace, kissed me on the mouth and pointed at a low door tucked away in a corner. “Maybe he didn’t want us to find him here.”

We ducked through the door and ascended the narrow staircase. The steps were slimy and chipped, and occasionally one would crumble under our feet. The darkness here was not velvety like that of a moonless night. It was like a dank horse blanket, and we both shuddered at its clammy touch. The walls were closing in around us, but eventually, we reached the top of the stairs, pushed open another door and stood in the chamber on top of the turret.

“Well,” I said to my lover, while Athos fished in his pocket for the box with phosphorus matches. He relit the candle that had been blown out on the stairs. “Here we are, then. Do you think your wayward son has come this way?”

“Vlad!” Athos called. _Lad – Ad – Ad!_ replied the echo. A flutter of wings beneath the ceiling, and a swarm of bats whooshed above our heads and shot out through the latticed window.

“Do you think your pet shares your penchant for prison cells?” I asked, venturing deeper into the darkness, where I had caught sight of chains on the wall. A cage stood by the window that led to the bartisan. Like the _täuferkörbe_ in the St. Lamberti Church in Münster, it had once served to lock up prisoners and exhibit them by hanging them from the turret where they were picked to death by birds of prey. The ancient bars were unlocked, and I stepped into the cage and traced the outline of the links with my fingertip, like I had traced the beads of my rosary.

Athos put the candle on the ground; I saw the light dance and shadows shift on the walls. He stood behind me, and his breath stirred my hair. “What do you mean, Aramis?”

I seized his wrist in an iron grip. “The confined space… the chains…” I pushed my hips back into his groin. “You like that, you deviant.” A manacle snapped shut around Athos’ wrist. “Is this why you brought me all the way up here?”

“ _Aramis_!”

“A romantic trip to the prison chamber?” I twisted out of the circle of his arms and left him tethered to the wall. He was watching me with murky eyes, his head lowered, his lips parted.

“Don’t blame me, chyortik,” he murmured. “You’re the one who brought chains into this.” He tugged at the chain and its rattle reverberated between the walls and fluttered under the ceiling like flittermice wings.

“Just because I know you, my pagan pervert.” I began to circle him, and he turned his head to watch me move. “You heathen deities have a taste for depravity.”

Athos grinned like a dog, and for a moment I saw his brother’s face in those beloved features. “Unlike your Christian god, who knocked up a child without her knowledge.”

“I believe this is something that my God has in common with your Thunderous Father.” Having moved around him, I had forced him with the back to the wall, and he pressed his shoulders against the stones, in an imitation of Atlas shouldering his load.

“What do you want, chyortik?” he whispered, his eyes black and glowing, his legs slightly apart. “Whatever it is, you will have to come and get it.” He tugged at the chain. “I cannot move.”

I shoved my hand between his legs, where his cock was waiting for me, hard and firm as ever. He thrust his hips into my grip, growling, insistent and impatient. I squeezed and he sucked in a lungful of air.

“Turn around,” I told him.

“You demon,” he whispered.

“Turn around, Athos.” My hand on his crotch, his free hand in my hair, and he was pulling me into an open-mouthed kiss, devouring me with teeth and tongue, cushioning me with that magnificent body that I so loved. My blood boiled inside my veins, and its heat rose to my head and set my loins aflame. “Turn around,” I gasped, breaking away from him. “Put your hands on the wall.”

His shoulders appeared broader than ever above the slim hips as he stood with his back to me and with his arms spread. When I pushed his breeches down and his shirt up, the muscles of his arse tautened under the breath of cool evening air.

“Spread your legs,” I whispered in his ear, cupping his arse and kneading the firm muscle with my fingers. Athos groaned and his head drooped, and then he stood with his forehead pressed against the stones, his flanks, his ribcage shivering like those of a nervous stallion. I drilled the tip of my fang into the soft flesh of his earlobe. “You’re devastating, my godling,” I told him, rubbing his arse, dipping my fingers between his thighs and dragging them up in a way that made him shudder. “I pray on the altar of Discord every day, you know that, don’t you?” And with these words, I sank down to my knees and thrust my tongue into the cleft of his arse.

The slick slide against his heated flesh tore another groan from his throat. His knees buckled, and his legs opened for me as he angled his hips. His body was begging for my tongue, and I obliged: with slow, methodical strokes that wetted the tender flesh around the hole that waited to be penetrated. He loved this so much; the filthy depravity of the act was enough to make his cock drip. When I shoved my hand between his legs and cupped his balls, I felt the weight of his prick bear down on my palm. The rattling of the chain above my head told me that his arm twitched when I slid my tongue up and down and drilled the tip into the tight ring _just so_. My own body was thrumming, but I ignored my need and focused on the way Athos’ flesh grew soft and hot under my touch. Sweat pearled on his skin and pooled in the small of his back, and I licked it off with long laps of my tongue.

Then, my thumb against his hole, slipping inside, opening him with gentle strokes, and Athos moaned and then cried out when I bit into the taut muscle of his arse. I pressed tiny bites into his trembling thigh, fucking him with one finger, with two fingers, while he arched his back in desperate need for _more, deeper, harder_ \- words that his mouth didn’t speak but that his body screamed at me.

I snaked my other arm around him and closed my fist around his cock, and Athos sobbed out my name. Another desperate shove of his hips, my fingers disappearing deep inside him, and I pushed him into the wall and licked at his testicles from behind. In my hand, his cock spasmed. Around my fingers, his body clenched. And he was coming with my name on his lips, while his seed spilled over my hand and over the cold stones of the ancient castle

“What now?” His head had fallen back onto my shoulder the moment I stood up behind him, and he half-hung, half-swooned between me and the wall. I rubbed my aching prick against his arse, unbuttoning my breeches with one hand even as I cradled him to me.

I thrust my cock between his legs. The insides of his thighs were slick with sweat, and I rocked against him: slow and deep, like he had done that night on the way to Varna. I had sensed the sea in his blood then, and I felt it now. The rise and fall of the waves, the unstoppable tide that rolled over us and consumed us both, and I parted my lips over the taut ligaments at the side of his neck and drank his blood. It was mine and mine alone, and the deep imprint of my teeth was witness of it: the god bore the mark of a demon.

***

Once upon a time, not one hundred years ago and not two hundred, but much, much longer: in those long-gone times, a vast forest, an impenetrable forest grew at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains. Up, up among its rocky peaks reigned a king that was as beautiful as he was horrifying: the King of Serpents. His minions dwelled in the woods below: snakes of the wyvernkind, who served him and who protected him.

None of the people who lived in the glens and valleys dared cross the path of the Serpent King and his wyverns. They groaned under the yoke that the cruel ruler had thrust upon them, and they suffered the snakes and wyverns to roam the lands and carry off their fattest sheep, their healthiest cattle and their speediest horses.

How was a mortal supposed to compete with a dragon?

Until… until… one day a young cioban shouldered his măciucă and ventured along the meandering paths, among the rocky boulders, until he came to a secluded pass where no human had set foot before.

What happened then?

A blood-curdling scream pierced the ears of the older ciobani who herded their sheep in the alp, a scream that struck like a lightning bolt from the clouds. Nobody knew what the young man’s eyes had beheld, for a sudden storm blasted among the mountaintops and swooped down into the valleys. Thunder and lightning, wind and clouds rushed down in a torrent, and waters of the Deluge boiled in a horrible frenzy.

The Dragon King did not forget. Ever since that day, he sent his minions to haunt the mountain-dwelling folk year after year, as if to mark a gruesome anniversary. One year, it was poisonous serpents who slithered into the humans’ homes. Another year: seven-headed dragons. One year, _raubritter_ in black armour, and another year: the winds, the stormy winds that tore down houses and carried off livestock. Or foaming waters that swallowed all that they encountered in their path.

Until… until… an old wanderer came into the valley. He had come from the tallest peaks, from the most inaccessible paths, from behind the Lake of Ice and from behind the Lake of Frogs; following the bear path, crossing the falls where water plunges into a fathomless abyss. He had ventured along the path under the waterfalls and crept up the path of the marmots and the path of the goats. He jumped across a ravine, and he pushed away a boulder that lay before the entrance to a cave filled with unimaginable treasures. He treaded on sand of gold and walked between pillars of silver. The pots of gold, of carbuncles, of onyxes, of beryls, the size of grain and the size of peas, and the size of hazelnuts and the size of chicken eggs and the size of goose eggs.

He had not looked at any of those treasures. He stood by the waterfall that sprung from the living rock with the clear clink of finest glass. Its crystal drops were pearls, and if one were to hold a sieve under the spray and if one were to wait, one might catch a pearl that was more splendid, more dear than any other: the magic pearl.

Warmed upon the bosom of a good woman, a woman whose thoughts were pure and whose heart was righteous, the pearl would grow, and when the time came…

A boy was born: his skin as pearly as milk and blood, set aglow by the light of the sun and the moon, the blush of aurora in his cheeks and the strength to slay the Dragon in his heart.

When the time came.

_The serpents are coming._

Serpents weaving and coiling through the soil and dirt, through the undergrowth, crawling closer and closer with a rustle of scales upon sand and rocks. Mouths open and fangs poised, poison dripping like green sap, like black tar, black earth in my eyes and my mouth, a black mare crouching on my chest, smothering me, and I woke with a gasp and darkness enveloped me.

My eyes were blind even as I tried to blink them free, and my mouth was dry and brittle like old parchment. When I moved my lips, the corners crumbled to dust. A cast of plaster had been poured over me and had dried into an armour around my body. Soft noises penetrated the armour, the murmur of a stream, the rustling and hissing of serpents, and then – a ray of light. So sudden, so harsh that it stabbed me in the eye and pierced my skull. I cried out words that were like dust in my mouth and throat.

Divine light: I knew it well. The scent of ichor pure, Athos was there, and I could smell… his blood…

The soft, sucking noise, the hiss, the rustle, and when I turned my eyes, I saw him. The King of Serpents.

Wyverns wove intricate patterns before my eyes; serpents coiled and writhed on the chest and arms of the mare that crouched on my lover’s chest. I forced my gaze to travel higher, and I saw: the open mouth, the poised fangs, dripping with burgundy-red blood like black tar.

Dracula smiled.

“You’re awake, Uncle,” he said in a low voice. “I didn’t expect you to wake. You are stronger than I thought.” He wiped his bloodied chin with the back of his hand. “You weren’t supposed to witness this. I do have some familial feelings, you know. But since you’re here now…” He waved the blood-stained hand in front of my face, close enough for the smell to overpower me, not close enough for me to reach it with my tongue. “You might as well rejoice in my good fortune.”

He struck like a serpent, stabbing his fangs into Athos’ neck and sucking, sucking my godling’s blood with greedy maws.

For a moment, the scent of Athos’ blood invigorated me. My arm shot out and my hand closed around Dracula’s wrist. “I’ll kill you,” I spat out dust and black soil between clenched teeth. “I will destroy you.”

“Calm yourself, Uncle.” He had turned his head and was rubbing his cheek against Athos’. “You can’t move. I hope you are comfortable like this?” He reached out and patted the pillow next to where my head rested. “I wouldn’t want you to suffer… unduly.”

The snake-like face turned away from me again, and the open mouth fastened itself to Athos’ neck. Dracula’s finger trailed along the line of my jaw, but the cast of crumbling plaster was unpleasant to the touch. He pulled his hand back and laid it on Athos’ chest.

A growl rose within my breast. It erupted from my mouth, and its blast was so that it set my chest aflame. For a moment, heat rushed back into my frozen limbs and I fancied I could move them, almost, _almost_.

But the terrible cold had me in its grip. The ice did not thaw. The hemlock cup that Socrates had drunk killed him once the poison had reached his heart, having paralysed his limbs and muscles first. His heart had died, and he had died with it. But not me. My heart might be dead, but my souls lived on.

Dracula’s hand slithered under the fabric of Athos’ chemise. His talons dug five thin welts into the marble skin. “Delicioussss!” The hiss rose in the cloud of vapour that steamed off the open wound. Dracula twisted his neck to look at me, even as his mouth remained clasped to Athos’ wound. “You’re so strong, Uncle,” he whispered. “How could you ever stop? How could you not _take it all_?”

Two ivory daggers flashed and pierced my lover’s flesh. A high-pitched noise, like the squeal of a giant bat, rang through the air and my eardrums burst. Blood gushed from my ears, blood soaked the pillows, my blood or Athos’ blood: it was one and the same. Beside me, riding Athos’ pelvis like a mare, the Dragon drained the god of the very last drop, until nothing remained but a husk that withered and crumbled, divine energy haemorrhaging fast into the serpent nourished in the bosom that it now destroyed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you think we mock Dracula? We do not mock Dracula:
> 
>  _I had hardly come to this conclusion when I heard the great door below shut, and knew that the Count had returned. He did not come at once into the library, so I went cautiously to my own room and found him making the bed. This was odd, but only confirmed what I had all along thought—that there were no servants in the house. When later I saw him through the chink of the hinges of the door laying the table in the dining-room, I was assured of it; for if he does himself all these menial offices, surely it is proof that there is no one else to do them._ Dracula, Chapter 3: Jonathan Harker's Journal
> 
> I'm not sure if those "menial offices" include emptying Jonathan's chamberpot, but I believe they must. There is no-one else to do it.


	6. A Study in Scarlet

**Wuthscheid Castle, Transylvania, August 1868**

The Dragon raised its head.

Dark blood dripped from its fangs, and its tongue darted forth and licked the drops off its red lips. The plaster cast around my face solidified; dust seeped into my mouth, dust crept into my nose. I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t smell, for even though I saw it, I could not smell Athos’ blood. It was gone, forever, soaked up by the serpent that uncoiled and unfurled its wings. The Dragon rose above me like a cobra spreading its hood, and serpents curled and unfolded on its chest, slithered around its arms and neck. For a moment, it hovered frozen above me. Then, it began to disappear: the fangs pulled back, the gleaming eyes darkened, the dark mass of its body withdrew and faded, the wings melting and fusing with the surrounding blackness until it swallowed it whole.

Beneath my mask of plaster, my mouth creaked as I forced my jaws apart. A wail burst from the depth of my throat, a high-pitched shriek that shattered the cast that encased me into a million shards. I threw myself into the dust like a sinner, and then – an explosion of light as the scent of Athos’ blood flooded my senses.

***

“Aramis.”

“No…”

“Aramis! Come on, sweetling…”

“ _No!_ ”

“Wake up, my love.” Lips pressed to his forehead, arms trembling whilst attempting to shake him awake, I tried to pull my beloved back from the death dream that had gotten its talons into him. “Come back to me, darling,” I begged, pressing my lips to his ear. “Come on back. You’re safe here. I promise you.” He flailed against me, his eyelids too heavy to open, as if they had swollen shut. “Aramis, I need you to wake up!”

He moaned weakly, as if all fight had gone out of him, and went limp in my arms. My heart gave a painful jolt inside my chest. He had always been so easy to rouse, I had never seen him like this before, I could not begin to imagine what was happening to him.

I grabbed my dagger and slashed open my wrist, pressing the bleeding wound against his mouth. Then, I waited.

I did not have to wait long. He eyes flew open and he leapt off the mattress with a heart-rending cry and threw himself into my arms.

“Hush, my love, you’re all right now,” I whispered, pressing him against my chest. “It was just a bad dream. You’re safe. No one is ever going to bury you.”

He sobbed and shuddered into my neck and I pulled back to brush his hair away from his face and get a better look at him.

“Athos!” Such anguish in his voice, in his eyes, my heart rebelled against it.

“My love,” I pulled him close again and shut my own eyes. “Tell me what is wrong. What happened to you? What did you see, my little nightwing?” I wanted to weep. I needed him to tell me what to do, where to go, whom to slay. I would have done anything to make the pain stop that was raging inside him.

“I thought you were dead.”

He spoke the words into my chest, my body muffling his voice, making it sound almost disembodied, like a ghoul had spoken and not Aramis at all.

“ _Again_ ,” his mouth moved hotly against the thin cambric of my chemise. “I could not stand it again… It was… I could not bear it.”

“Aramis… _gods_!” I pressed my lips to his hair and dug my fingers into his back. He still shook like a leaf in my embrace, as if I had not succeeded to tear him completely from his mares.

“I knew I wouldn’t survive it, Athos. My heart would break.” He looked up at me, with his black eyes brimming with the clearest agony. His hand pressed against my chest and his lips trembled. “What does it feel like when one’s heart breaks?”

I shook my head, “Aramis… don’t.”

“Tell me.”

I pressed both my hands over his, where it lay over my own heart. His face was set and resolute, with the horror of his dream still written all over it. I wished that by speaking I could chase those moribund thoughts away. But this is what he had asked of me - I could not deny him in this, as in anything.

“It feels like the heart is a tightly strung lyre,” I spoke quietly, “and the lyre’s strings begin to snap, one by one.”

“Does it hurt terribly?” he asked, pressing closer to me until his forehead touched my temple.

“It is the worst pain I have ever felt,” I admitted. “It’s a sharp pain, each time a string breaks, and it radiates throughout your whole body. It feels like you’re burning on the inside.”

“I did that to you,” he whispered in that eerie, disembodied voice. “Twice, I did that.”

“Please, you mustn’t think of those things anymore.” I turned my head and kissed the tip of his nose. “I’m not going anywhere, not ever.”

His fingers interwove with mine. “This is the longest we have ever been together, you and I,” he said quietly, while his thumb brushed over my knuckles.

“Like I said,” I forced a smile. “Not going anywhere, Aramis.” I let my hands trail over the sides of his face, down his neck and his exposed chest. “You’re covered in cold sweat, kitten. Why don’t I get Grimley to draw you a hot bath?” He looked up at me from underneath his thick lashes. “You always feel better after a hot bath.”

He gave me a grudging smile and, with a quick kiss, I left him to go and give Grimley instructions. When I returned, I found Aramis balled up on top of the bed, his eyes staring off into an unknown distance. His hair fell in a dark cascade over the side of the mattress. His breath was so infrequent and shallow that for a moment I worried he had departed his vessel. 

Quietly, I knelt by the bed and took his hand in mine. “How did it happen? In your dream?”

“Vlad.”

I could not help but laugh at that. “Kitten, please! Your mind is a dark and morbid place, indeed.”

“You underestimate him.”

“And you underestimate me.” I pressed my lips to his hand. “A fiercer chyortik by far had not yet succeeded in sucking life out of me. Come on.” I wrapped my arms around him, and carried him out of the bed.

“Undignified,” he muttered into my neck, even while wrapping his arms around me.

“I won’t tell anyone, I swear.”

The tub stood ready, with clouds of steam lifting over the water, and I lowered Aramis in, seating myself on the stool next to him. His skin pinkened from the heat but his eyes closed in peaceful contentment. I pulled the soap and the washcloth to me and let my arm dangle in the water with him, letting my fingers drag across his skin in soothing circles.

“You’ve been on edge the entire time we’ve been back here, in your homeland.” I picked up the washcloth and applied soap to it, admiring Bartelby’s ingenuity in being able to find aromatic soaps even in the wildest armpit of Transylvania. I reached in and pulled out one of Aramis’ legs. “For a while, I thought you were feeling better.”

“I will never feel better,” he sighed and leaned his head against the lip of the tub, exposing his long throat to my gaze. 

“Why do you say that?” I asked, trailing the washcloth over the long lines of his thigh, around his knee, down his shin.

“This… nightmare… that my mind has conjured. This thought. It haunts me. It has not left me since I brought you back, the last time upon Olympus.” I gave him a wary look as he spoke, but he seemed calm and composed, so I stayed silent. “I’m terrified that I will lose you again,” he admitted, his eyes still shut as if he dared not meet mine.

“Nothing can kill me,” I reminded him, moving the washcloth over the arch of his foot. His toes wiggled as my thumb pressed into the tendons of his instep.

“You laugh about the darkness of my mind, Athos,” he went on, whilst I applied myself to intently washing his foot and each one of his toes. “But if you were to ever _see_ it, to truly know the darkness inside me, you would turn from me in horror. You would abandon me.”

My hand clenched around his ankle. “ _Never_.”

“I love you for believing that,” he uttered with a smile so angelic that my breath halted. And then I dropped his leg back into the tub, grabbing the other one and beginning to wash it in turn.

“After everything we’ve been through, my love, what could you ever do or be that would possibly drive me away?”

He closed his eyes again, hiding from me to the extent he could while I rubbed soap suds into his skin and then rinsed him off with the bathwater. 

“How can you be sure, Athos?” he spoke at last. “I am not even sure myself of what I am, or what I am capable of.”

“I am sure that you are mine,” I responded. “And that is all that matters.” With those words, I scooped up his right leg from the tub and held his foot with both my hands. “There is no part of you that I do not adore, in or out,” I maintained and pressed my lips to the arch of his foot. A quiet laughter shook his body, and encouraged by it, I hastened to place a kiss upon each one of his toes before he pulled his foot away and sat up in the bathtub.

“Are you going to kiss my mouth with that mouth, count?”

“We’ve done worse,” I pointed out and knelt at his side, allowing him to draw me into a slow, bone-melting kiss.

***

Aramis lay on top of me, his head pillowed on my chest, while I carded my fingers through his hair, pressing them firmly against his scalp. Occasionally, his breath would shudder in his lungs, and come out as a tremulous puff against my naked breast and my fingers would halt and tighten against him.

“Perhaps you should…”

“I won’t sleep,” he responded too quickly.

“... Feed?”

“You’ve already used up that tactic on me earlier,” Aramis purred softly, as my hands resumed their rhythmic caresses.

“Human food?” I suggested.

“Not hungry.” I felt his eyelashes flutter shut against my skin and I craned my neck to place a kiss to the top of his head.

“Tea?” Grimley sprouted up like a wild mushroom in the middle of our bedroom. “I have taken the liberty of bringing some local honey. I thought the doctor might find it rather soothing.”

I felt a pang of sudden affection for the perennial Olympian nuisance and allowed myself to smile in reply, even if Aramis refused to stir from where he lay.

“Put it over there,” I motioned with my head, not willing to separate my hands from where they rested in Aramis’ long tresses.

“Master Vlad would like to see you,” Grimley added with guileless politeness. “He heard the doctor was feeling poorly and wanted to pay his respects. I can tell him to bugger off, if you prefer?”

“Grimley, you’re a gift,” Aramis murmured into my chest.

“I know, sir.”

“Go,” I mouthed at the guardian.

“Shall I bring in the pastry Master Vlad has fetched for you, sirs? As I said, he was very concerned for your well being. I suspect he may have baked it himself.”

In my arms, Aramis tensed.

“Please thank him from us, Grimley,” I replied, “but it won’t get eaten today.”

“Not by _you_ ,” the insolent gnat smirked on his way out.

“Wait here,” I said, gently rolling my beloved onto his side. He flashed me a worried look and I quickly kissed the furrow between his eyebrows away. “I’ll be right back.”

“If it’s about that pastry, Athos, it isn’t worth the trouble.”

I laughed softly and kissed him again. “I’ll return in a moment.”

I was able to catch both Grimley and Vlad conversing in the hallway.

“Honey cake, Tatic?”

I broke a piece of the sticky bread off and scarfed it down, casting a wary look towards our bedroom. “Thank you, it’s delicious.”

“You’re stress eating, Kyrios.”

“Be quiet, you impudent ass!”

“Is Uncle quite well?” Vlad inquired with perfect politeness. “Whatever he needs. I can fetch him a snack from the village if he prefers something more savory.” 

“That is very kind of you, but no. And it is nothing. It will pass.”

Vlad bowed and departed with a measured step. His long raven hair, which he had worn much more wild and naturally curled than my beloved, billowed in his wake like a banner.

“May I eat the rest of this, Kyrios?”

“At least share it with Bartleby, you greedy pig.” I turned to go, when the gnat’s grasp alighted upon my shoulder.

“Kyrios, if I may, your little experiment with raising a new Wallachian revenant does not appear to be working. Perhaps, your mistake is in that you are not raising him properly.”

“Excuse me, pest?”

“With your cock.” My mouth gaped. “Well, it isn’t a proper erastes/eromenos relationship, is it?” the Grigori went on, undeterred. “Why part with tradition? These newfangled methods simply don’t work, Kyrios.”

“Aramis was just _nice_ to you, you ungrateful shit!”

“With all due respect again to your spouse, but he - ah, isn’t in his right mind, is he? It doesn’t count, ...count.”

Vindictively, I broke another piece of the honey cake and shoveled it down my own throat while Grimley watched and salivated. “Get out of my sight,” I mumbled with my mouth full.

“Suit yourself, Kyrios.”

I returned to our bed chamber and wrapped myself around Aramis, who still lay exactly where I had placed him a few minutes earlier.

“Was I unjust to him?” Aramis’ words were so quiet, I had to press closer to his lips to hear him. “I can never trust him now, Athos. I cannot even bear the thought of looking at him.”

“I know, Aramis,” I pressed my lips to his earlobe. As much as it had been for the wrong reasons, but Grimley had been right. The experiment was failing. Aramis and Vlad were clearly not meant to reside under the same roof. “I’ll… equip him and send him on his way.”

“To where?”

“To where he is apparently dying to go! Bloody England!”

***

Athos wrote a letter to a solicitor’s in London and to another one in Whitby. We had passed through there on our way to Newcastle in 1648, and we remembered it as a charming town with an old abbey and an old graveyard full of tombstones, which Athos believed would appeal to Dracula, who insisted on taking his coffin along on his journey.

The London solicitor showed himself delighted to be contacted by a wealthy European count. He promised to dispatch one of his junior employees to meet Dracula in Varna and brief him during their voyage to Albion.

Athos concluded every discussion of the upcoming journey with the words: “Don’t eat the solicitor, Vlad. You will need him. England is a very strange place, and you will require somebody to guide you through. I had my Grigori when I first lived in England. Perhaps I could tell Grimley to acco-” Athos caught my eye and abandoned this train of thought. “I’m sure you’ll be fine,” he said. “Just… don’t eat the entire crew of the ship, Vlad. Somebody has to steer it into harbour. I’ve taught you some theory of navigation, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able to perform any of the tasks yourself. Not to forget: you might get seasick. The mal de mer is a common ailment and nothing to be ashamed of.”

I stood up abruptly. “I’m going to write a canto,” I said. “You know where to find me if you need me, count.”

As I was leaving the room, I felt Dracula’s solicitous gaze glued to my back, and heard him whisper: “I never knew Uncle was so devoted to poetry, Tatic.”

“Oh, Aramis was a bit of a poet in his youth. He has a chequered past.”

My fangs sprang forth. Discord or not, the godling would pay for this.

We said our adieux in Varna. The Black Sea was as tempestuous as it had ever been; as dark and forbidding as in those days when Athos was a stranger, a god from a heathen pantheon whom I began to worship more ardently than I had ever worshipped the Christian god. We had sealed our covenant here, and the blood of a god had flown through my veins ever since.

That was something that would forever be denied to Dracula, no matter how much his eyes begged for something that his mouth didn’t dare speak. He wanted Athos. He wanted him more than he knew, for he knew not what it was that he wanted. Once a drop of Athos’ blood passed his lips, he would spend the rest of his life driven by the desire to devour him. 

Devour him like I did.

We had accompanied Dracula to Varna to hand him over to the English solicitor, and we spent the night in the monastery where I had been first immolated by divine flames. Beneath me, Athos’ body writhed, sweat dripping from every pore as I screwed myself slowly into him, like he had screwed himself into me centuries ago. “Can you feel this?” I whispered, dragging my tongue along the straining tendon of his neck. “Can you feel all of it?” My fangs broke through his skin and he moaned. “You’re mine,” I informed him and sucked. The torrent of blood that shot into my mouth made my head spin. The first times he had shared it with me, the melange of light and dark that swirled inside my head had rendered me blind. I had learned how to control it: how to feel him, _all_ of him, when we made love and when he poured his lifeforce into me in a neverending, inexhaustible stream of scarlet.

The ship set sail the next day. I saw Athos more moved than he had been in years. “Goodbye, Vladic,” he said, as his large, liquid eyes were dark with emotion. “I wish you a good journey. Don’t forget to always carry an umbrella with you: England is not as cold as Wallachia in wintertime, but it is an abysmally rainy and foggy place. You will have to get used to the weather just as you will have to get used to the food. A propos food.” Athos lowered his voice and leaned in. “ _Don’t_ eat the solicitor. If nothing else, he’d been reared on beer and boiled mutton, his blood will lack the spice that you are accustomed to.” He glanced at me. “Take it from your Uncle.”

“Thank you, Uncle,” Dracula said seriously, bowing to me. “I appreciate your advice and shall attempt to follow it. I would like to think that my taste is rather too refined to permit me to sink so low. Even in England, I’m sure I will be able to find worthy-” his eyes gleamed and his tongue flicked out to lick over the red lips, “prey.”

“I’m sure.” I returned his bow and then took a step back to calm my blood. The sea breeze rushed between us and plucked apart the tendrils of scent that sleeted off Athos’ skin and the predatory odour of Dracula’s. My head cleared, and for a moment, I saw the blue sky flash between clouds and a skein of geese heading south.

Dracula stepped closer and embraced Athos. “Tatic,” he murmured. A growl rose in my throat and my fangs tingled. Athos had clasped the vampire to his breast and said in a tremulous voice: “In a few minutes, you will have left me, my boy. Left me forever, Vlad!”

“Count,” replied the vampire, “I had formed a determination, that of asking you for your protection and guidance in England. But you would have thought that cowardly. I have renounced that determination, and therefore we must part.”

“You know you leave me desolate by going, Vlad.”

“Listen to me, count, I implore you. If I do not go, I shall wither and degenerate here. I must leave this godforsaken place and spread my wings.”

The shadow of the wyvern passed above us in the wake of the geese, and I shuddered.

“In my days, I had been a warrior and a conqueror. I understand now that I cannot be the same in these modern times, but I know there are other ways to seize power. I have to study them, and when I succeed-” Dracula smiled, and I saw the fires of Hell flicker in those black eyes of his. “When I succeed, the world will be – as they say – my oyster. I am loath to part with you and Uncle,” another flicker of eyes towards me, “but I beg of you: don’t hold me back. Send me away quickly, count, or you will see me basely deteriorate before your eyes, in your house. This is stronger than my will, stronger than my strength. You may plainly see that within one year I have lived thirty years, and that I must take control over my life, and of the life of others. The English Empire is the most powerful one in the world, and it has the finest army. I must see its monarch and learn from her how to build and rule over a kingdom that spans the entire world.”

“Then,” Athos said, coolly, “despite my warnings, you go with the intention of learning how to reign over mortals? Tell me! Do not lie!”

Dracula grew deadly pale, and remained silent for two seconds. Then, all at once: “Tatic,” he said, “Like my Uncle, I have promised to devote myself to god. I will pray at the altar of Discord, as you have taught me. If humans should follow me in my devotion – who am I to stop them? My faith gives me the strength not to forget that I owe you everything, and that nothing ought to stand in my esteem before you.”

Athos embraced the vampire again and said: “You must make your own mistakes. But don’t forget: you have pledged yourself to me, Vlad. In two weeks, you shall be in England. You will then do what will be proper for you to do. The British have a fine dynasty and a fine army – and if you wish to join it, I will not stand in your way. But you have to promise me one thing, Vlad: if you ever become a soldier, you must not ride headlong at the enemy without any backup or protection.”

Dracula stared at him. “Why should I do that, Tatic? I’m not an idiot.”

Athos frowned. “I… don’t know why I said that. Very well. Go now. You are free, Vladic. Adieu.”

We watched Dracula step on board ship together with the English solicitor – a pale, sickly looking man, who was likely to become even more sickly on his voyage – and we waved our adieux. “He isn’t really your son,” I said without moving my lips. “He’s not even Raoul. Don’t think that _I_ don’t know why you said that, even if _he_ doesn’t.”

Athos grimaced. “I know, flittermouse.”

“Let’s go.” Another shudder ran down my spine, and I looked up to check the skies for a dragon tail disappearing behind the clouds.

Athos smiled – the ancient, heathen smile that turned his eyes the colour of amber and turned my bones to water.

“Where to, Aramis?”

_Home._

There was no home. Wallachia wasn’t my home any longer. I had not returned, the wayward son, to the bosom of my homeland. For centuries, I had avoided the country of my birth and rebirth, fooling myself in my heart of hearts that one day, I would come back and my souls would be at peace. I had been cast out of Paradise and the way back was barred. I was condemned to roam the earth forever like the Wandering Jew. I had lost my faith, my ambitions, my career, my sanity and my roots. All I had left was my god, and I grasped his hand in mine and pressed it hotly.

“Where you go, I will go,” I whispered. “And where you lodge, I will lodge.”

His eyes lit up. “Come,” he said, and we walked upon the shores of the Black Sea as the Aurora coloured the sky with hues of lavender and pink.

***

**Split, September 1868**

_My dear friends,_

_Or should I address you as my dear brothers, for in all my long life never have two people been closer to me that you, count, and you, doctor, or whatever it is the two of you are calling yourselves these days. To me, you are, as ever, Athos and Aramis: Immortal Marrieds._

_I’m relying once again on my cousin Zephyrus to find you and deliver this to you, even though you’ve long been off the map, so to speak. Still, the Winds know no borders, and my Titanic relatives have long been better at circumventing such obstacles as “time” and “space” than the Olympian branch of the family. No offense, Athos._

_I write to you from Split, on the Dalmatian coast, where I have just put in with my new ship and crew. Once I was done with my civic duty of chasing slavers, I realized that being in the service never had as much appeal to me as being captain of my own enterprise, and I wasted no time using my significant naval and physical prowess, as well as Takoyaki’s gift of storytelling, to recruit myself a new bunch of scallywags and then, as you can imagine, it was “Raise the t’gallants!” and away we went. Incidentally, the men have dubbed our new ship the Kraken. I’m sorry, Athos, you must think this terribly uncouth of me, but I could not resist the irony._

_Please come see her: I’m certain you will love her. The Kraken is virtually unsinkable, I would bet my life on it. Except that is silly because I cannot die. I intend to remain here, in the port of Split, at least until next spring, and I hope to see you long before then._

_Incidentally, the remnants of Diocletian’s retirement home here are quite fantastic. I know, Athos, you have traveled much with Hadrian, and I’m curious how you think it measures up to similar Roman fare that you would have seen. Did you know that Diocletian professed himself to also be the son of Zeus? Well, Jupiter, technically. Is it true? From what I hear, he hated the Christians almost as much as you do, you naughty god-slayer._

_I hope and expect to see you both soon, and to find you well, happy, and together._

_Eternally yours,_

_Porthos, the Once-and-future-Pirate_


	7. The Cloister and the Hearth

**Simeria, Transylvania, October 1868**

On an October evening, a shepherd was watching his flock on the edge of a green plateau at the foot of Retyezat, which dominates a fertile valley, thickly wooded with straight-stemmed trees. This elevated plateau, open, unsheltered, the north-west winds sweep during the winter as closely as the barber's razor. This shepherd had nothing arcadian in his costume, nor bucolic in his attitude. He was as roughly clothed as his sheep, but quite well enough for the hole at the entrance of the village, where sheep and pigs lived in a state of luxurious filth.

It was four o’clock in the afternoon. The sun was sinking towards the horizon. A few summits whose bases were bathed in floating mist were standing out clear in the east. Towards the south-west two breaks in the tree chain allowed a slanting column of rays to enter the ring like a luminous jet passing through a half open door. In the valley, a troop of men of indeterminable Slavic extraction and Germans from across the mountains used the last hours of daylight to make headway with the newly built railway station.

A small caravan came down the mountain road. The two riders that formed the vanguard were men of aristocratic provenance, with noble bearing and proud faces. Behind them rattled an ox-drawn wagon, with two servants perched on top. The taller of the two pulled in the reins and addressed the shepherd, who was watching the train with vacuous eyes.

“Is there an inn nearby?” the driver asked in German, for the local people understood all the languages.

The shepherd gave the directions in a dialect of the Rouman language, which was a mixture of Latin and Slavic, and he crossed himself as they rode on, watching their backs until they disappeared behind the next curve in the road.

The inn was an old structure, half wood, half stone, much patched in places, and a good deal covered with verdure. It consisted only of the ground floor, with a glass door giving access to the terrace. First, one entered a large room furnished with tables for the glasses and benches for the drinkers, with a sideboard in varnished oak on which gleamed the dishes, pots, and bottles, and a counter of black wood. On the right, adjoining the large room, a half-dozen of small rooms were enough to accommodate the few travellers who stopped there rather than entering the rapidly-growing village of Simeria.

Evening had fallen and darkness had enveloped the lands, when the latch of the door was lifted from the outside; but the door, being bolted inside, could not be opened. The innkeeper, who had already retired to his attic, hastily came down. To the hope of finding himself face to face with a customer was added the fear that the customer might be some evil-looking abomination, such as were common in that part of the world and to whom he would be only too ready to refuse board and lodging.

For that reason, he proceeded to hold a parley through the door without opening it.

“Who is there?”

“Two travellers.”

“Alive?”

“Very much alive.”

“Are you sure of it?”

“As much alive as we can be, Mr Innkeeper, but ravenous. We shall die of hunger if you keep us outside.”

On this assurance, the brave man crossed himself and unbolted the door. By the light of his lamp, he examined his guests with great attention and made sure he had really to do with human beings. The ostler was dispatched to take care of the horses and oxen; meanwhile, the innkeeper’s wife had come down, and a group of labourers, who had seen lights in the windows, availed themselves of the opportunity of ordering a nightcap.

“Forgive me, Your Excellencies,” said the innkeeper. “I didn’t mean to insult you with my suspicions. But the Hunt had been spotted in the mountains, emerging from the autumn mists like ghosts.”

The guests exchanged a look.

“The Hunt?” said the elder of the two, a tall man with piercing eyes and haughty demeanour who was shrouded in an aura of grandeur and grace such as were never seen in these wild lands.

“Led by the Headless Horseman, Euer Hochgeboren” elaborated the innkeeper’s wife. “He rides on a large steed, and he carries his head on his knee.”

“What does he do?” The stranger inquired.

“Many have seen him, Your Excellency!” The innkeeper pointed out.

“Has he attacked anyone?” The stranger persevered with his interrogation.

“Not yet, Euer Hochgeboren.” The innkeeper’s wife crossed herself with a fearful look at the door.

The stranger followed her gaze. “Has he ever come all the way down here?”

“No, Jesus and the Holy Virgin be praised, Your Excellency.”

“You said it was a hunt. Does he have an entourage?”

“A… what?”

“An entourage. Followers. _Hunters_.”

The steady gaze; the calm, mellifluous voice; the air of aristocratic self-assurance; the scepticism of an enlightened man of the world: confronted with the stranger’s cool demeanour, the innkeeper’s voice faltered and his thrilling tale began to lose momentum.

“He’s alone,” he mumbled.

“People have seen him, Euer Hochgeboren” the woman added, and some of the men hunched over the neighbouring table nodded and muttered assent.

“One man hardly constitutes a hunt,” the stranger said lightly.

“He carries his head in his hands,” the innkeeper’s wife reiterated. “He has been coming down the mountains for centuries. The pastor says there are old records in the church where it is written.”

“How old are the records?”

The company looked round. The other man had spoken: a youth of no more than twenty-two years of age, with a mild, open countenance, fresh, rosy complexion and a soft voice that compelled his audience to listen.

“They go back centuries, Euer Hochgeboren,” the innkeeper said.

“To the times when the Dragon King ravaged the lands?” The young man smiled, showing teeth that were very white and even and as well cared for as the rest of his person. “I thought so. I have studied the history of this country most extensively.” And indeed, he had a studious air and the fine, white hands of a scholar, as soft and fine-boned as the hands of a lady. When he moved in his seat, his coat fell open and revealed a cross that hung around his neck against the black cloth of his vestments that made him appear almost priest-like. “The stories that you have heard about the dragon and his minions,” another smile, a mere twitch in the corners of his mouth, “they are stories of the ruler from the House of Drăculești. By all accounts, he was not a merciful man. His knights in black armour were the cruel _raubritter_ whom folk tales distorted into seven-headed dragons and serpents.” He looked away from his listeners, lowering his lashes with another fleeting half-smile, and then lifted his brilliant eyes to the face of his companion.

“Indeed!” The latter said in a tone that reverberated into the very bones of the gathered villagers, like the sounds of a brazen bell. “You can trust my friend if he says that he has studied these histories in great detail. He knows what he is saying.”

“Your Excellencies have not seen the headless horseman,” the innkeeper said, crossing himself with another furtive look towards the door. “He can’t be explained away as a folk tale.”

The stranger waved a hand regally. “Trifles!”

“It’s a corpse,” the young man said. “I have seen it before, in Siberia. Do you remember, count?” His eyes again met those of his companion and smiles crossed in mid-air. “The body of a beheaded man, one who has been executed by the foe or by the law. How do you want to transport him back to be buried by his family if not on horseback? It is custom with some tribes of Siberia to tie the bodies of their dead to their mounts, horses or camels, to transport them. If a horse escapes – well, it ends up roaming the lands with the headless horseman on its back.”

The innkeeper did not look convinced, but he did not argue further. While the travellers let the explanation sink in, a murmur rose among the group of men at the other table, something of “lights in the wilderness”.

“Bartleby!” The young man had barely raised his voice, but the short man in a servant’s garb appeared by his side in an instant. “Set up your camera. I believe we should immortalise these good people.”

Light as bright as the midday sun flashed through the dim room and blasted through the windows with a loud _crack_. Then – darkness.

***

  
The bed at the inn was huge. Athos and I drowned in the eiderdowns stuffed with goose feathers, and he rolled into my embrace, naked and sweaty, rubbing his spent groin into my hip with flat jerks of his pelvis.

“I enjoyed your learnèd lecture tonight,” he purred into the skin of my neck. “And so did our hosts. You had them in your thrall, chyortik.” A warm puff of air against my skin as he laughed softly.

“Hm. Bedevilling peasants,” I huffed. “Is this what I have been reduced to? What next? Will I be demonstrating the secrets of magnetism to the easily fooled at village fairs?”

“You can bedevil anyone you want, Aramis,” Athos said, for once serious. “The question is: is it worth it? Is it _wise_?”

I sighed, and for a while neither of us spoke.

“How do you do it, Athos?”

He sprawled on my chest, one arm trapped under me, while the other hand traced the contours of my body. It reached my armpit and stilled, open palm pressed against my flesh. He rubbed his mouth against my chest. “Do what, Aramis?”

“How do you live like this? Without aim and purpose?”

His lips parted over the spot above my heart. “I believe my life _has_ a purpose.”

I snorted, even as my hand alighted on his hair. “Is this it?”

“Isn’t this enough? More than enough.”

“That’s not what I mean. I-” I bit my lip and raised my eyes to the canopy above. “This is more than I could ever have hoped for,” I admitted and felt him smile. “But, I was a warrior, and so were you. You were advisor of men who ruled the world, and I was advisor to powers behind the throne of France. You built a monastery that is the largest in the world and I-”

“You wanted to be Pope.” He smiled, and his breath brushed over my skin.

“I could have succeeded,” I muttered.

“Chyortik,” he laughed softly, and the sound vibrated through me. “You could have succeeded in everything you put your magnificent mind to. But is it worth it? Have you not seen what hubris does to us? To any of us?”

“You encouraged Dracula to go to England, where you _know_ he will attempt to cause mayhem.”

“He’ll learn.” Athos yawned. “We all have learned.”

I persevered. “What are we supposed to do with our lives? Become like your family, aloof and unchangeable, spending eternity in a dormant state, apart from humanity? Or become like… common strigoi, skulking in the woods and fading into shadows?”

“We can be what we are now.”

“For how long? Ever since,” I swallowed and my hand in his hair tensed. “Ever since we have been reunited, we have been meandering, Athos. When you were a soldier, you were part of a system that was greater than yourself.”

“Do you want to join an army, Aramis?” He lifted his head and kissed me lightly on the chin. “Because we can do that, if that is what you wish. All you have to do is tell me which one.”

“No.” I sighed and rolled my head to the side. “War is not for us, Athos. Not anymore.”

“You are worried that Ares would find us again,” he said calmly.

“No. I am not.” The rush of blood, the anger, the fury of men whose blood poured into my mouth. It no longer carried the flavour that it used to have when I first roamed the battlefields of Europe. Perhaps I had been feeding on the blood of a god for too long. Or perhaps soldiers today were no longer like the warriors of yore, spiced with virility and power and the righteousness of men who fought under the banners of gods. “I’m not worried about Ares, he can no longer touch us. But on whose side should we fight, Athos? Whose is a worthy cause? Catholics against Protestants?” I laughed.

“Even when you were a musketeer,” Athos said, drawing slow circles on my shoulder, “You once said that you felt ‘a great repugnance to fire on these poor devils of civilians’, and Porthos accused you of having pity for heretics.”

“Did I?” I smiled. “I don’t recall. Good old Porthos, we did a good job converting _him_.”

“Verily!” Athos laughed. “We made good Christian warriors, my sweet diablik.”

“We did indeed, my pagan idol.”

“Do you wish to enter a monastery again?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well. That was always the other option you chose, whenever soldiering grew too tedious.”

“What would you do? Write your memoirs? A novel perchance? A picaresque tale based on our lives.”

“Only to be plagiarised again? You know how those authors sniff around us. Not to mention that the picaresque genre went out of fashion over two hundred years ago.”

“No, nothing like that,” I grimaced. “You could try your hand at an adventure novel in the style of whatshisface, Marie and Marion’s latest project. Verne. Just stay away from romantic poetry, I implore you!”

“Little chyortik’s great ambition,” Athos improvised, “Has not yet come to fruition. / He desires so much more- Ouch!”

“I will fuck you till you’re sore!” I cut short his impromptu verses. “You just wait!”

“Yes, please!”

“You deviant!” I snarled, wrapped my legs around him and rolled us both over, pinning his arms down. The pillow opened like fresh snow and swallowed his head.

“Can’t… breathe…” Athos was laughing, while his cock slid slickly between our bodies, stiffening against my stomach.

“Serves you right. You think my struggles are a hilarious joke, oh mighty Olympian.”

“No. I don’t.” He freed himself from the goose-down trap by tossing his head to and fro, and then craned his neck and kissed me on the mouth. “Tell me what you want to do, Aramis.”

“I would like to go to university and study medicine. Properly.”

Athos wrenched his wrists from my grip and slung both arms around me. “Whatever my chyortik wishes.”

I wrinkled my nose. “If only hospitals weren’t so filthy. Remember those butchers who called themselves field surgeons in the Crimea? Why, we gave Varna a wide berth and escaped to Siberia instead, because dysentery was rampant and we didn’t fancy watching ten thousand soldiers shit themselves to death in those hellholes they called lazarets.”

He lifted a hand to my face and brushed away a hair that clung to my lashes. “You can change that, angel. You’re a walking advertisement for hygiene, my love.” He pulled me down and rubbed his soft beard against my cheek. “Mmh… kitten is very clean.”

His ear had come within reach of my teeth and I nipped at it. “I’m going to fuck you, you dirty pervert,” I threatened.

Beneath me, his thighs fell open and cradled me, pulling me in into the heat that blazed under his skin, in the coiled muscles and in the blood that heaved in his veins. “Aramis,” he sighed, shoving one hand down my back to grab my arse. “Everything. Whatever you want… it’s all yours.”

***

**Split, Dalmatia, December 1868**

The bell tower of the Cathedral of St. Domnius rang out its call, reverberating throughout the walls of the ancient mausoleum, for that had been its intended use when Diocletian, the last bastion of paganism in the Roman Empire, had been laid to rest in it. The granite columns had been the only part of the original interior to survive once the Christians, those same Christians whom Diocletian did his best to wipe off the face of the planet, had moved in with their God-on-a-Stick.

“Still bitter about your rivalry with Jesus after all this time?” Aramis’ breath ruffled the hair on the back of my neck.

“You have to admit: it is an abomination that today Christian so-called ‘saints’ are entombed in Diocletian’s mausoleum, whereas the emperor’s own remains have been scattered to the four winds.”

“Ah yes, well, the _winds_ are merciless, Athos.” His lips brushed against the nape of my neck. “It’s the same Anemoi, aren’t they? They don’t even work very hard to change their names in these parts: Bora… Boreas…” I heard his footsteps fall down the apse as his words were carried further away towards the exit. It seemed the house of the Christian martyrs no longer held much interest for the man who had once wished to be Pope.

“Jugo sounds nothing like Notos,” I muttered to myself, examining the sarcophagus of St. Domnius himself. I also cast a disapproving look towards the altar of St. Anastasius and his millstone, for good measure, before following Aramis out the doors of the Cathedral.

He stood upon the steps, looking across the Peristyle square, shielding his eyes from the winter light, even as storm clouds gathered above our heads.

“It’s going to rain again,” I offered, absentmindedly watching the graying skies.

“I’m surprised at you, you know,” Aramis continued a thread seemingly unfinished in his own mind. “Coming to Diocletian’s defense like that. He, who dared call himself ‘Jovius’.” His black eyes kindled with a playful fire. “What say you, my own son of Jupiter, shall we investigate your father’s temple, as well?”

Thick drops landed around us as we ran across the Peristyle into the shelter of the Temple of Jupiter, obnoxiously rechristened into St. John’s Baptistry.

“Impertinent!” I pronounced as Aramis slammed me against the baptismal font and pressed his fingers in between my legs, curling them right behind my sack. “Aramis… I see you are very aroused by the triumph of your Godsicle over the pagan hordes… Ah!”

“It is a proper baptismal font, you have to admit,” he whispered, mouthing at my earlobe, his front teeth scraping along the curve of my jaw. “Large enough to submerse a man, as it must have been done in the time of Christ.”

“I have some sad news for you, kitten, regarding the river Jordan,” I chuckled, grabbing his ass with both my hands, if only for balance. “In some parts and in dry season, it is so insignificant as to allow you to stand on the East bank and the West bank simultaneously.” His hips thrust forth against mine, pinning me bodily to the stones of the font, so that I could feel the woven-rope relief digging into my spine, imprinting me with emblems of Dalmatia’s nautical heritage.

“You want me to fuck you,” Aramis growled against the shell of my ear.

“I do,” I breathed.

“Tell me why.”

“Because… fuck!”

I lifted my eyes towards the vaulted ceiling as Aramis’ hand slipped inside the confines of my breeches at the same time that I felt the drag of his fangs along my jugular. I shut my eyes and willed my vocal chords to suppress a moan that was striving to rise from my throat.

“Tell me,” his hand squeezed and twisted.

“Because you feel so good inside me…”

“Oh, for the love of…! Why do I ever expect to find the two of you doing anything else?”

I opened my eyes again, my vocal chords relaxed into a groan of frustration.

“Did you think we’d come in here to pray, Porthos?” I laughed, pushing Aramis away with a look of regret and a smile that his own lips echoed in response. His hand lingered against my rapidly hardening flesh, before withdrawing as he raked his nails against the skin of my lower abdomen.

“Your cousin gets easily aroused by Roman architecture,” Aramis winked at me, placing his fingers against his lips and trailing his tongue over the same digits that clenched my cock mere moments prior.

“Oh, do not go blaming this on _me_ , chyortik mine.”

“I would think,” Porthos was saying, doggedly avoiding looking at us directly, as if fearing he’d go blind were he to see something untoward, “after all you’ve told me about your adventures in Wallachia, that you’d be more careful about where you fuck. Even more so where you bleed!”

“One must always strive to seize the moment, Porthos,” Aramis replied as, beyond the baptistry doors, a concert of raindrops sounded against the wet pavement. “Besides, it is Christmas,” he beamed with one of his beatific smiles that never failed to melt the hearts of all his willing victims. “Be charitable. Surely, you do not begrudge us a little opportunity to taste the Yule log.”

“Eww!” Porthos exclaimed and I slumped laughing against the font, clutching at my sides.

“Poor Porthos. A few years away from our company and you get so unaccustomed to the state of things.” I clapped my hand over one of his bulging biceps and gave him a friendly squeeze.

“On the contrary. I’m quite accustomed to the state of these so-called things. As a captain of a pirate vessel, you can imagine, I have had many opportunities to officiate over a matelotage. Incidentally,” he poked my chest, “if you ever want me to help you make an honest man of Aramis, I’m happy to oblige.”

“I would not like him so much if he were honest,” I grinned and pressed Porthos to my heart, or rather myself to his, our height difference considered.

“A matelotage?” Aramis was frowning.

“Ah yes,” I whispered into Porthos’ ear. “I forget that Aramis is quite the romantic when it comes to the notions of marriage. He doesn’t think it should be entered into unless the individual parties plan to… How did you put it, flittermouse? Spend an eternity together?”

“I would not have said an eternity, you utter deviant.”

“Of course not. I must have been thinking of something else.”

“A matelotage allows two men on a crew to share property,” Porthos said, clearing his throat.

“You mean booty?” I prodded.

“Shut it, Athos.”

I turned my head only to find Aramis standing at my side and reaching out to take my face into both his hands. “You are unbelievable. I don’t believe in you,” he said, pressing his lips against my own.

“I’ll be on my ship then,” poor Captain Porthos announced, stepping out into the wet streets of the carcass of Diocletian’s Palace.

“The _Kraken_! So rude!” Aramis declared, laughing in between kisses, while I pulled him behind the baptismal font.

***

 _**Count Vlad Drăculea, Carfax, London** _  
_**to: Count A. von Fulger** _  
_**Split, Dalmatia** _

_Dear Count & beloved Tatic,_

_London continues to be delightful! As you know from my last letter, I have taken possession of the old mansion that the solicitor’s office purchased on my behalf. Permit me once again to thank you for the funds that you and Uncle Aramis so generously supplied me with; my gratitude extends to the worthy Bartleby, whose financial insights have proved to be invaluable._

_I have established myself quite comfortably in the chapel that is attached to the mansion. I believe I have at least one thing in common with Uncle Aramis: we are both drawn to ecclesiastic architecture and the symbols of Christian faith. It is in our blood, so to speak. There is something so very comforting about the sight of a cross as it looms over your bed, with the nude man nailed to it who you know was dying in excruciating pain over the period of several days. It gives me the most pleasant thrill to look upon it and imagine myself in the role of the Roman soldiers who erected the crosses like I had erected the pales in my time. The Turks, among whom I had lived for a long time as a boy, practised this form of slaughter too, and even then I enjoyed the spectacle very much._

_London, too, has its fair share of beautiful symbolism. I enjoyed many a stroll through Highgate Cemetary, picturing all kinds of creatures crawling from their resting places if the soil ever soaked up your sacred blood. Ah, Tatic! Words cannot express how eternally grateful I am that you and Uncle have raised me in such a fashion! This new world into which you have brought me is most exciting._

_Just imagine, Tatic: I have made the acquaintance of a young lady who has given me ample encouragement, and I now live in hope that one day she shall be mine forever. Technically, she is married to the solicitor chappie who came for me in Varna, but as he is the most tedious, bloodless fellow, I don’t believe that her marriage can be to her satisfaction. I have taken the liberty to pay her a nightly visit once or twice, for she has very obligingly moved into the one place in London where she knows that I had been a frequent visitor before. I had followed the invitation of a man who at first appeared to be useful, but then turned out to be an imbecile who feeds on vermin and attempts to spill my secrets to the humans who keep him. One day, I shall put him out of his misery, but not yet. For now, I ignore the stink of his contaminated blood and focus on the fragrance of my Beloved, as she sleeps the sleep of a maiden. I watch her in her slumber, sometimes for hours, to prolong the pleasure. Until… she wakes oh so sweetly at the sound of my voice that does not wake her oaf of an English husband._

_Darkness has fallen. The hour of my rendezvous with the beautiful English Rose is nigh. Adieu for now, Tatic, and convey my warmest regards to my dear Uncle, whose lessons on good manners and deportment I have taken greatly to heart. I would never have imposed on the lady had she not made it perfectly clear that she welcomes my advances by choosing that house as her place of residence!_

_Yours loving_  
_Vlad_

_P.S. I have made a very interesting new purchase: Whitaker’s Almanac. Truly, it can’t be a coincidence that such a useful guide to all things English was first published after my coming to London!_

***

**Paris, Winter 1869**

Mr Mackay, who shared his countrymen’s distrust of all things foreign, had sent his daughter to a Parisian convent presided over by an abbess who was English by birth. Mother Superior had brought not only a recipe for brewing weak English ale from her foggy homeland, but also a predilection for flagellation, such as was enthusiastically practised in schools all throughout Albion.

It was for that reason that Miss Minnie Mackay’s countenance was pale and drawn as she stood in my cell, having brought me my supper. Marion, who was sitting in the window niche with her sewing, looked the girl up and down. She then directed the gaze of her bright lynx eyes at me and raised her eyebrows.

“What happened to you, child?” I said gently. “Come and sit down close to me and tell me about your griefs.” I patted my bed, for I had become quite the invalid, and my body was failing me rapidly.

“Thank you, Sister Mary Innocentia,” the girl said, but she remained standing.

Behind her back, Marion smirked. “Why won’t you sit?” she asked with a smile that made me think of Aramis. “Have you been punished?”

Minnie’s lip wobbled and her eyes glittered with tears. She was a sensitive child, whose mind was a veritable mine of fanciful tales. She was a liar, whose imagination was much more powerful than her abilities to spin stories that didn’t fall apart once her listener pulled at a thread. Her mother, as she had told me, had been an Italian countess, which of course endeared me to her greatly.

“Don’t cry, dear,” I said to her and took one small hand in mine. Her fingers were white and delicate, ethereal almost, and made mine look old and yellow in comparison.

“I wish I was dead!” the child pronounced with the usual dramatic fervour of youth.

“Sometimes, life is too great a burden,” I sighed. “Life on Earth, that is. For this is not all life there is.”

“I know. There will be eternal life once we’re dead,” Minnie said sullenly.

“Yes, and it will be glorious.”

“I wish I could die!” she reiterated the sentiment. “They would cry over me if I were dead. You would cry over me, wouldn’t you, Sister Mary Innocentia?”

“Of course I would,” I assured her. “I would weep my eyes out. Most likely, my heart would break and I would follow you into the embrace of death.”

“I don’t think one’s heart breaks so easily,” Minnie said. “Or mine would have long broken.”

“It doesn’t have to be a heartbreak,” I said. “There are other ways. The nymph Ophelia has showed us one.”

She looked scandalised, yet intrigued. Like all humans her age she had a great fascination with death. “That’s a sin!”

“Is it?” I smiled and squeezed her hand. “Oh, my dear! It might be a sin to cut one’s life short with poison or the pistol – crude, vicious tools designed by man to destroy other men. But to give yourself over to God? Let the powers of Nature claim you as you sink into His embrace? To entrust your soul to Him – what could be more noble and elevating? To become mistress of your own fate – what could be more triumphant?”

I watched her eyes grow large as grander-than-life images unfolded and took over her sullen and whimsical brain.

“Think about it, my dear,” I continued. “What a fate is ours on this low Earth. From the cradle to the grave, we are watched by spiritual spectators, by angelic spirits – watched with unflinching interest, unhesitating regard. Sorrow, sin, pride, shame, ambition, failure, obstinacy, ignorance, selfishness, forgetfulness – all those vices make our patron saints veil their radiant faces in unpierceable clouds to hide forever the sight of so much crime and misery. Yet if there be the faintest, feeblest effort in our souls to answer to the call of their voices, to rise above the Earth by force of the same will that pervades their destinies: how glad it would make those blessed, divine spirits. Glad with a gladness beyond that of their own existence if they knew that some vestige, however fragile, was spared from the general wreck of selfish and unbelieving humanity.”

“I… don’t think I understand,” she stuttered, flushed and bright-eyed, titillated by the pathos of my nonsensical speech that I had prepared under the influence of laudanum. What had worked for the Romantics and the Spiritualists, I had told Marion, would work for me.

“The Spirits of the Air will cradle you in their arms, my dear,” I explained.

“Do you mean angels, Sister Mary Innocentia?”

“Angels, the blessed spirits sent by God to conduct the soul of the innocent child to His Kingdom,” I sighed. “Don’t fear death, Minnie. It will bring you welcome solace.”

“I don’t fear it,” she protested quickly.

“Good!” I said and smiled. “The only problem is: what to do with one’s mortal coil. But the spirits will guide you when the time comes.”

“You would like to be rid of the burden of your body sometimes, wouldn’t you?” Marion had stepped over, silently like a cat, and stood behind the girl. “To become weightless, as if you were floating in water. To stop your breasts growing and your menses flowing. To stop the pain.” She had put a hand on the girl’s lower back, and Minnie tensed. “You are in pain, aren’t you?”

The girl lowered her eyes and bit her lips.

I sat up and leaned in. “Have you been spanked, you naughty girl?” I whispered in English, and a giggle burst forth.

“We can do something to alleviate the pain,” Marion said and turned to the chest by the wall.

“God loves you, my dear,” I muttered, watching the girl’s face. “And He is everywhere. When you sit in the chapel and watch M. de Rohan preach – does that not send a tingle through your entire body, until you squirm in your seat? And when you walk in the garden and run and hide in the furthest corner, by the stream that calls out to you in the summer heat – does that not elevate your soul? Both sensations are equally true, both indicators of a Divine presence. For your body and soul are one, as God and nature are one. To give yourself to nature is to give yourself to God.”

“Turn your back to the light and pull up your frock.” Marion had returned with a jar in her hand. Her lynx eyes flashed with amusement. “Don’t look at me like that, child. You know I am here to nurse Sister Mary Innocentia. I can spare a few minutes to nurse you as well, as Sister is not in need of my immediate attention.”

I smiled encouragingly. “We want to help you,” I said and let go of Minnie’s hand. “Now turn around and let me see.”

Her bottom was as plump and white as I’d imagined it, and Marion and I exchanged an approving look. The white flesh was flushed and criss-crossed with angry welts left by the correction cord. Catholic chastising coupled with the English love for spanking – a potent combination that had left the poor child unable to sit down.

“Hold your skirts up, and I will rub in a salve that helps you heal,” I told her. Her buttocks tightened when I touched them with slick hands, and when I began to massage oil into her blemished skin, her thighs began to tremble. I took my time, stroking and caressing her taut, young flesh with confident strokes, while Marion held the girl in place. At last, I saw it: between Minnie’s shaking thighs, moisture began to pearl. Heat rose from the pink, tender flesh and settled on my skin.

“You’re hot, aren’t you, my dear?” I said casually, and just as casually slid my hand down the swell of her bottom. She groaned and her hips jolted. “Hot and in pain,” I muttered. “We must find a way to cool your poor, abused skin.”

Marion let go of the girl, whose knees buckled.

“Stand up!”

She obeyed, trembling more than ever. Behind her back, Marion knelt down and blew cooling air over the flesh that was burning up, even as moisture continued to trickle down the inside of her thighs.

“More salve, I think.” I scooped up some with my fingertips and spread it with wide swipes. Marion looked at me, parted her lips and her sharp teeth flashed. For a moment, I fancied she’d bury her mouth in the soft, rosy flesh. But all she did was raise goosebumps with another cooling breath.

“Well done,” I said and withdrew my hand. Minnie whimpered and I patted her hip. “You’re a good girl. This balm will help you heal – but don’t tell anyone about it. You are supposed to feel the full force of your punishment. You can let go of your skirts now and turn around.”

She faced me and muttered something with quivering lips. Her face was flushed scarlet and her eyes glazed over. Under the cover of her frock, she was rubbing her thighs together in her desperate desire to deal with the itch that was burning her up.

“Are you still in pain?” I asked with a gentle smile.

“I don’t know,” she choked out.

“Where does it hurt?”

Her hand flew to her groin before she knew what she was doing.

“Ah, yes,” I said. “This is not something we can help you with, my dear.”

“But what we can do,” Marion said, “is tell you how to find relief: you will have to find a quiet corner, somewhere where you are undisturbed. Then, press your legs together, slip your hand under your skirts and press one finger to the spot where your thighs meet. Press down as hard and as often as you need.”

She stood speechless, breathless and ready to faint with embarrassment. “What are you waiting for?” I asked. “You may go. Find a quiet spot.”

Once Minnie had rushed out from my cell, Marion sank down on the bed next to me. “What do you think?” I asked my beautiful Dame Blanche. “Will she do?”

“She’ll do very nicely,” Marion purred. “A delicious prospect.”

“I thought you were going to minette her then and there.”

“No.” Marion leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. “Not until she is you.”


	8. La Mare au Diable

**Kringa, Croatia, March 1869**

“What do you think, chyortik, was gospodin Jure Grando perhaps a relative of yours?”

Athos, Porthos and I stood by the grave of the vampire of Kringa, and Discord was doing his best to get a rise out of me.

“I doubt it,” I said through clenched teeth. The sun had shifted behind the treetops and its rays fell askance at the group of mourners in whose wake we had entered the graveyard and whose liturgical songs drowned out the words of our conversation.

Discord grinned. “Are you sure? He appears to have been quite the connoisseur of human blood, which is a trait that runs through your family.”

“He was an Istrian peasant and a common strigoi,” I said. “My family are not the only ones who have a taste for that particular beverage.”

“By all accounts, he was more than a common strigoi,” Athos said.

“What do you mean?” I sneered. “He drank the blood of infants, that is as common as it gets. Those peasant bloodsuckers feed on the weak and the frail; some even gorge on cattle and other filthy beasts. It makes them weak and filthy in turn.”

“What are you then?” the God of Discord smirked, and his divine blood heaved in my veins.

“I am what I eat.” I narrowed my eyes at him, and his smirk deepened.

“Oh stop flirting, you two,” Porthos exclaimed. He had taken his hat off and joined in the song of the mourners with much gusto. Porthos had always had a taste for the pathos of truly Christian worship. “You’re both as stiff as that poor creature there.” He pointed in the direction of the coffin. “Maygodhavemercyonhissoul,” he added, crossing himself with much vigour.

Athos raised his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth twitched, while his blood shot to my cheeks and erupted in a livid blush.

“Your protégé drafted my family tree, remember?” I said. “I don’t remember it including any Istrian peasants.”

“He would be much further down, my proud princeling,” Athos said. “When was he alive, I mean undead? I see the tombstone was erected in 1652, but Herr von Valvasor says in his _Ehre dess Hertzogthums Crain_ that the good man was walking around, terrorising his old neighbours in 1672. Do you know anything about that?”

“In 1672, I lay in your tomb with your rotting remains, my love.”

“Oh.” He bit his lip. “I forgot.” He glanced at Porthos and then back at me. “He might have been a descendant of one of your relatives.”

“In which case he would be so far removed from me and his blood so diluted that he no longer counted as a relative,” I pointed out. “At some point the ties of ‘family’ are severed when blood is watered down. If you go back generations, you will be able to trace family ties to everyone on Earth, as we are all descended from Adam and Eve. Or in your case, from the Thunderous Father,” I smirked. “Don’t jump to conclusions, my godling, and assume that just because your family never alters, the same is true for all of us.”

Porthos, who had been twirling his moustache as he listened to my lecture, now exclaimed: “Hah! I think you’ll find that my family is older than that of my cuz! If anything, Grand-Da deserves the honour of being called the Allfather.”

“There you are, Athos,” I said with a smile. “Do you wish to claim that Jure Grando was a descendant of Cronos?”

“You are a cunning sophist, sweet pupil of the Jesuits,” Athos said, smiling. “But I think you’re forgetting that, very much like Jure Grando, Cronos was a child-eater.”

“Who’s the sophist now?” I breathed.

“Oh sweet Baby Jesus!” Porthos threw his hands in the air. “I’ll leave you to it, shall I? It looks like the mourners are about to leave, and an excellent feast awaits them, I saw an ox being dragged to slaughter. They will hardly turn a stranger away when he wishes to pay his respects to the dearly departed and console the widow.” He gave his moustache another twirl and puffed out his chest, upon which sparkled various medals, both genuine and fantastic. “Don’t desecrate the grave, I beg you,” he added. “Remember what happened last time when you were left near a tomb unchaperoned.”

“Don’t marry the widow,” I retorted. “Remember what happened last time you ensnared a woman of childbearing age.”

“Ho, ho, ho!” Porthos slapped his thighs. “Let us all be sensible for once, my friends!”

“If you are what you eat, Aramis,” Athos picked up the thread again, as we strolled arm in arm across the plateau behind the church, reading the names on century-old tombstones. He pressed the pulse point in his wrist into my forearm. “What does that make you, my chyortik?”

“Tender-hearted,” I muttered.

He snorted with laughter, but checked himself quickly. “Oh.” A swift sidelong glance, and Athos was frowning. “Is this true?” The ‘ _Is it my fault?_ ’ hung in the air, unspoken, and my heart gave a sudden throb. Athos had died when the pain in his heart had got too much. But how much was too much? My heart was not in agony; it was in my mind and my souls where the torment was taking place. And yet the hurt spread. Pinpricks of pain, like tiny needles that stabbed me from within, jabbing at the fibres of my muscles and the tissues of my blood vessels. Would they ever wear down those delicate membranes and would burning pitch pour into my heart in a torrent, until nothing remained but ash?

“No, my love,” I told Athos calmly, pressing his arm with mine. “My heart is my own. It is ruled by the blood that flows through me, the blood of many proud nations. I was born in the whirlpool of Europe and Asia, where the pagan gods mated with the spirits of Christianity, where the Roman Church fought with the Church of the East. I shall always be torn between my passions, but my emotions are my own.”

He was listening to me in silence, his arm a comforting weight against my ribs and his scent infinitely familiar and soothing. “ _Zwei Seelen wohnen ach in meiner Brust,_ ” I murmured, blinking against the setting sun.

“You told me, when we first met,” Athos said softly, “that you were born with two souls, and that this is what made you what you are. Do you still believe that this is true?”

“I don’t know, Athos.” We continued in silence for another few paces, our boots squelching in the mud. “There are countless reasons why one might return from the dead. If Vlad is any indication, there is something in the blood of my family, possibly passed down the female line, like haemophilia. I believe I remember – though I might have only dreamt it – my mother telling me that I had a twin brother who died in the womb. Perhaps his soul survived in me.”

“Not to forget the thirst for vengeance,” Athos smiled and brushed his lips against my temple. “You are very vengeful, my angel with the flaming sword.”

“I am that.”

We had come full circle and stood before Jure Grando’s grave again. “Do you feel like desecrating it, kitten?” Discord smirked.

“Perhaps not. We promised Porthos.”

“Porthos is cavorting with a young widow even as we speak.”

“Hm.” I looked round and found the graveyard deserted. “I am not going to bite you. One wayward strigoi running around, craving your blood, is more than enough.”

“I assume you are not referring to yourself in such a disparaging tone.”

“Your _son_ ,” I leaned in, even as he walked me backward until I ended up pressed up against the tombstone. “He claims Queen Victoria survived the bite of a vampire, there is something about her blood that is not quite right.”

“I don’t think he meant that he, personally, _ate_ the monarch,” Athos frowned. “He probably just smelled it on her.”

“Yes, you keep telling yourself that, _Tatic_ ,” I wrinkled my nose. “Until her children sit on the thrones of Europe. You thought _my_ hubris is bad, wait till royal offspring succumb to the call of their blood.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” Athos said and pushed my mouth open with his lips.

***

**Paris, April 1870**

“Monsieur le docteur is making excellent progress, apparently.” I pointed to the open letter that lay on my bed before me. “He writes that he has passed his first exam with flying colours.”

“Who would have thought that the bloodsucker would seriously embark on a career in medicine?” Marion said.

“I believe it is less the healing aspect that he enjoys and more the cutting-up aspect of doctoring. He’ll make a good doctor. He’s clever, clean and dexterous.”

“Let’s face it, Aramis finds it hilarious that he is training to be a doctor in the city where he first became Dr Flitterbatt,” Marion said. “And if _he_ doesn’t, Discord certainly does.”

“I spent some time in Austria with Discord and the doctor, before Marie Duplessis married the comte de Perregaux,” I said, fanning myself languidly with the pages of the letter. “I remember it distinctly: Aramis played the piano and Athos made him sing old Wallachian songs.”

“These two always find new ways to entertain one another.”

“Always.” I smiled, tossed the letter aside and patted the mattress, inviting Marion to sit down next to me. “A propos entertaining – did you give Minnie the book?”

“I smuggled it to her, very cunningly and secretively. The air of mystery and the forbidden fruit gave her quite the thrill.”

I smiled and took Marion’s hand in mine. “All is ready,” I said softly. “Springtime, Beloved!”

“Your stream is sparkling merrily in the furthest corner of the garden,” Marion said, pressing my hand. “This is where Minnie will hide away to read _The Sorrows of Young Werther_.”

“A novel that had cost many a young man his life,” I sighed, reclining in my pillows. “Very tragic.”

“Indeed, my love.” Marion leaned in and kissed me on the cheek. “And now-” She stood up, squared her shoulders and set one foot daintily in front of the other. Her dress glowed so white that a halo appeared around her frame, and her translucent face and dark eyes morphed into windows into another world. A veil of gauze shimmered behind her, around her, enshrouding her into a cocoon that separated her from the room in which she stood. “If you feel up to it, my beautiful nymph – may I have this dance?”

***

**Transylvania, November 30, 1870**

It was the day of Saint Andrew’s Feast, and all through the orchards young mothers filled their arms with branches from apple and cherry trees. Whose twig might bloom by New Year’s Eve? These good, god-fearing Christians were as pagan in the year of their Lord 1870 as they had been back in the Roman days, from which they gathered their celebrations, in particular the _Noaptea lupului_ , the Night of the Wolf.

As we rode through the village, it was difficult not to smile at the wreaths of garlic hung upon the doorways of dwellers of Transylvania. The Night of the Wolf approached, and with it the strigoi and other evil spirits, drawn to their hearths by the smell of human blood and fear. This was the night on which wolves had been known to speak, and those who might hear them would fall down to rise no more.

It was evident, even as I sat in my saddle and cast him a quick look, that such stories never lost their appeal to Aramis, amusing him almost as much as Vlad’s latest letter, the call of which we had hastened back here to answer.

“I hate to say ‘I told you so’, and yet..,” Aramis alighted from his steed and handed the reins over to Bartleby.

“A proper chyortik never skips an opportunity to gloat,” I smiled at him, and ducked the metaphorical dagger he had thrown at me with his shining black eye. “Grimley, the lodgings?”

“We will have a time convincing the locals to house strangers on the Night of the Wolf, Kyrios.”

“We cannot very well ride on towards the castle in broad daylight,” I reminded him. “What if the hunters should see us approaching?”

“What if we come too late and they had already beheaded him?” Aramis asked with a cheerful gleam in his eye.

“How many did he say there were?”

“Six, I believe.”

“Trifles,” I shrugged and rummaged in my satchel for an apple to feed my horse. He had been a powerful ally in our trek through the mountains of Transylvania. “Grimley, go assure the hosts that we’re as human as it gets around these parts.”

Aramis laughed, his cheeks flushed from the cold wind and the brisk ride through the snowcapped countryside. Winter had come to Romania, and if any wolves were to gather on St. Andrew’s Eve, it would be easy to see their tracks in the virgin snow.

“You’re beautiful, my diablik,” I whispered, in the meantime, while Grimley groused and stomped off to bedevil peasants in his own special way, by being as politely annoying as possible. “And I see the possibility of tonight’s hunt has left you in excellent spirits.”

“This promises to be rare sport, the kind we have not had since Santorini,” he whispered back. “What do you suppose these plebeians will come brandishing at us this time? Ivory tusks? Crowns of bay leaves? Perhaps a stick blessed by the Pope himself?”

“I have my doubts about the latter, chyortik, for I do not believe them to be Catholic, these new friends of Vlad’s.”

“The one he wrote about - Van Helsing - remind you of anyone?” We both laughed again. “They might overcome us by talking our ears off yet!”

“A room is being prepared for the Count von Fulger,” the Grigori reported with a serious expression. “I assured them that while the gentlemen would have preferred two rooms, one would suffice.”

“You did no such thing, gnat.”

“You are right, Kyrios. I saved myself the trouble and accepted the one room.”

Aramis watched the horizon where the sky began to pinken over the tops of the mountains.

“I don’t suppose we have time for a bath?” he asked wistfully, wrinkling his nose.

***

The howl of the wolves in the distance accompanied us like fanfare to the very gates of Wuthscheid Castle. The key still fit and creaked in the lock which could have used a proper oiling. Inside, the air felt cold and damp. If Vlad had returned, he had forgone all signs of hospitality, leaving the fires in the hearth off.

“Chapel?” I raised an eyebrow and Aramis nodded in reply.

We bared our sabres in case of trouble and made our way to Vlad’s sanctuary of yore, our path lit by the Grigori and the leprechaun. A beating of wings against the ceiling had told us that we had once again frightened the resident bats, but then…

“Tatic!” And Vlad Dracula threw himself into my arms. “Uncle!” He proceed to pull Aramis into his embrace as well, until he clutched us both to his chest. “You came to my aid. I knew you would!”

“What have you done, my… friend?”

“Indeed,” Aramis smirked. “How did you find a hunter tenacious enough to follow you across the seas?”

“Van Helsing is relentless!” Vlad shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. “I did not even eat the solicitor’s wife to death, you know. I merely snacked on her, while she slept. I only took enough blood to sate my desire for her essence, no more, just as you taught me, Uncle.”

“I’m sure you did your best,” Aramis offered, in a show of unprecedented generosity that made me grin at him.

“I should have eaten the solicitor after all, perhaps?”

“There is still time,” Aramis smiled.

“Time, yes!” Vlad once more pressed us to his heart. “That is one thing that we have the world of, my dear fathers. Now that we are together again, we can eat them all.”

“Don’t be silly, Vlad,” I responded sternly, looking Dracula in the eyes. “You cannot stay here a moment longer. These men who are coming - they know how to kill your kind.”

“Are you truly telling me to flee, count?” He straightened up before us full of the pride of the dragons on his banners. “Should I - Vlad of the House of Drăculești, Prince and Voivode of Wallachia - flee like a peasant?”

“I am suggesting a tactical retreat, yes.”

“But together, we would be unstoppable.”

“And yet,” I continued, “it is better this confrontation not take place at all, if possible.”

“Our friends and we,” Aramis chimed in with gentle tones, “have gone out of our way to dispel the rumors of supernatural activities over the years. An encounter such as this one would lend credence to the fact that hunters are _necessary_ , rather than a bunch of deranged wildlings raised on fairy tale nonsense.”

“But a tactical retreat would…”

“Ensure that we pick a better battlefield for our next engagement,” I reassured him. “Somewhere a lot less scenic than Wuthscheid Castle.”

“Some place where they can die quietly,” Aramis added, “without the ability to brag of their deaths to anyone.”

“You both speak like the sages of the Bible!” Vlad exclaimed in a passion.

I was about to make a remark about men I have known who were much more sage than anything the One God’s Bible may have concocted, when my chest felt the constriction of my armor, as it suddenly materialized.

“They’re here!”

And then, the shattering of glass, as a projectile struck the window and seated itself inside Vlad’s chest.

“Get down!” I grabbed Aramis by the scruff of his neck as another projectile slammed against the stones behind us.

“Tatic!” Vlad groaned, clutching at his wound. “What indignity… They shot me with… a stick.”

“It’s a wooden stake,” Aramis diagnosed with unerring precision.

“Take Vlad,” I said. “Go now.”

“I’m not leaving you!” Aramis’ fangs dropped even as he clutched the offending piece of wood protruding from Vlad’s chest and pulled at it. Vlad howled, his chest spat up a fountain of blood.

“He’ll bleed out,” I pointed out.

“He won’t die from it,” Aramis protested. He weighed the piece of carefully designed anti-vamp technology in his hand. "The stick would be very useful for keeping off dogs."

“Aramis, _please_ ,” I begged, clutching him by the shoulders. “They know how to kill you. And him.” My beloved did not look convinced. “I’ll be fine, you know this. I’ll keep them busy while you escape. You know they cannot kill me.”

At our feet, Vlad was rapidly losing his consciousness along with his pooling blood.

“Grimley, take him!” I commanded.

“Yes, Kyrios.”

“Follow them, Aramis. I need you to do this.” Another projectile crashed through the window and splattered against the wall. This time, it had been a silver bullet. It was closely followed by another shot, this time grazing my arm that had been left unprotected by the armor of Discord. “Get Vlad to safety. Have Grimley feed him. I’ll dispatch these hunters and be right behind you.”

“I can’t…” Aramis’ eyes looked at me wildly. “I cannot leave you. Do not ask me to do this!”

“We’re talking hours… a day at most,” I reassured him, clenching his hands in mine and kissing him on both eyelids. “Please, just save him for me, flittermouse?”

“We’ll take the back passage,” the Grigori informed me, as he and Bartleby balanced an unconscious and bleeding Vlad in between them. “The doctor will follow us?”

“He will!” Once more, I pressed Aramis to my breast and kissed his raven hair. “Go now, my love.”

He separated from me with an anguished cry. “If you wish it!”

“I wish it.”

His hand clutched at my wounded arm, tearing off a part of my sleeve and clutching it in his pale fist.

“I will find you again.”

“You always do.”

He turned, swiftly disappearing down the back passage along which the others who preceded him. I waited for a few minutes, making sure that I no longer heard steps echoing down the corridor. I had not entirely trusted him not to return prematurely. At last, a sound of steps did startle me, but it was coming from the great hall: the hunters pursuing Vlad had forced the castle door.

I clenched the hilt of my sabre, raising it over my head to bring it down upon the intruders. Several more bullets wizzed passed me, one striking me in the chest, and bouncing off my armor that would be invisible to mortals. There were many more than six of them. I swung, bringing down the man closest to me, laying the other one out with a single punch to the jaw and running him through once he hit the ground. Several more bullets bounced off my armor, then…

“Halt!” a man’s voice echoed up to the vaulted ceiling. I turned to face the rest of my opponents. “You! I _know_ you!”

“I do not believe I’ve had the honor,” I responded, keeping my sabre raised.

“I am Doctor Van Helsing,” the man said, laughing. Unlike most men, his laughter contorted his face into an ugly grimace, as if the very act of mirth had been causing him pain. “But that is not my real name. You might remember me under a different name. The name of my grandfather.”

“Who was he?”

“Vangelis!”

I lowered my sabre. “I am here alone,” I told this phantom from my past.

“I don’t believe you,” the boy I once saved who had turned into this man retorted. “You traveled with this vampire last we met!” He turned towards the remaining hunters. “He is protecting the Dracula!”

So, our new hunter hero had mistaken Vlad for Aramis. My beloved would find that tid bit less than amusing, I thought, when I have the chance to tell him of it.

“This beast had tortured my grandfather, had desecrated my mother’s grave!” the hunter went on, pointing right at me with his arquebus loaded with a fresh stake.

The hall teemed with men. Not all of them could have been hunters, some of them had to have been mercenaries for hire. There were too many of them for me to kill quickly enough to ensure that none would escape to pursue my beloved.

“I saved you once before,” I reminded the ingrate. “I have no quarrel with you, Van Helsing, or Vangelis, whatever your name is.”

“But it is we who have a quarrel with you, my fine lord!”

“Then take me,” I said, dropping my sabre to the stone floor. Perhaps, I thought, if I cannot keep all of them from leaving, I could give them a reason to stay. “I am your prisoner.”

A circle of men surrounded me.

“Where is the vampire?” Van Helsing’s nostrils flared. Just one touch, and he would fall at my feet. I clenched my fingers, commanding a bolt of lightning to gather in my palms.

Odd. The sting of electricity did not let itself be known. What an inconvenient time for my powers to fail me, but I had to be philosophical about this. If I could get Van Helsing to focus his attention on me, then he would not be focusing on Vlad and Aramis.

“Still chasing after vrykolakades, young Vangelis?” I taunted. “You think you’re a big, strong man now, killing the strigoi around Europe. Tell me: do you know what I am?”

“Oh, I have not forgotten the night we met, _son of Zeus_!”

Ah, the scion of hunters was more clever than he appeared then.

“Well then? Have you ever killed a god, young Vangelis? Because _I_ have.”

“Can’t say that I have,” Van Helsing replied with the bravery of a man who had dozens behind him. “But I’m about to try!”

“I have all the time in the world,” I told him and tore the fabric of my chemise over my chest. My bare breast was uncovered to his human eyes, whereas the golden armor of Discord pressed around me, pulsating with divine energy. Even without my Father’s lightning bolts, he would still find it a challenge to destroy me. “Let’s play.”


	9. Castle Dangerous

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear Audience, the end is nigh. Enjoy!

**Transylvania, December 1, 1870**

There is nothing as black as the depth of the Wallachian night sky. In the abyss that gaped above our heads, winter stars sparkled with the glitter of eternal ice. The crystals of laughter that broke from the throat of gods and dispersed in the ether. The soles of my boots had pulled off the slimy stones with a squelching noise on every other step as long as our retreat had led us through the labyrinthine intestines of the castle, towards an entrance that had been hammered into the living rock when Wuthscheid Castle had been erected. I was keeping a few paces behind Grimley, who supported Dracula, dragging him without paying much heed to the vampire’s discomfort. Behind us, the sounds of battle faded. My sabre sang in the air, its blade as thirsty for blood as its owner.

We had spilled through the door to the accompaniment of the ancient, feral song that reverberated between mountains and forests. Noaptea lupului, the Night of the Wolf: those children of the wild took it seriously.

I turned and looked at the wall of black that loomed behind us. From here, the castle presented a surface of stone, the loopholes in its walls blind and not visible to the human eye in the darkness. I could make them out, black slits in the stone, and I narrowed my eyes and stared up, up the wall, up the turrets, up into the sky that granted me a glance into infinity itself.

“We must make haste, Aramis.” The low voice, the clipped tone were familiar. The use of my Christian name alone, the lack of a mocking edge were not. For the first time since I’d known him, Grimley was scared.

‘Athos will be all right,’ was on my tip of my tongue. As was ‘I’m going back to get him.’ Those two battled, and I said nothing.

“We must get Dracula to safety,” I said instead, as I pulled the vampire’s lolling head up by the hair. His face shone white, and his fangs had ineffectually stabbed through the skin of his lips. His eyes were as empty as the loopholes in the face of the stone structure behind us. “How long do you think you can carry him, Grimley?”

The sound of rustling leaves, of breaking twigs floated to me during a gap in the wolf song. “He won’t have to, sir.” Bartleby emerged from the undergrowth, leading a short, sturdy horse that pulled a crude peasant cart. “We’ll chuck Master Vlad in here.”

“How did you get this, Bartleby?” I asked, gesturing at the vehicle while the lackeys busied themselves heaving the lifeless body onto it.

“I assumed sir would need it,” Bartleby panted, shouldering a portion of Dracula’s loins while Grimley attempted to shove the rest of him in place. “So I went and procured it.”

“Yes, but _how_?”

The servants exchanged a look.

“Sir needed it,” Bartleby explained in short, plain words. “I fetched it.”

“Yes, I understand that bit,” I said. “What I’m asking is: how did you find it, in the middle of the forest and the night? And where?”

Grimley had successfully stowed Dracula’s limbs on the cart and turned to me. “What Bartleby is saying, doctor.” He was brushing his hands on his clothes, and the odour of blood hit my nostrils once again. I inhaled deeply, licking my teeth. “What Bartleby means is: you needed it. He procured it. This is what we do, sir. We _serve_.”

Behind us, the castle emitted a yawn: a deep dark noise that rose from its belly and spilled out through the open door. A gust of wind, a sigh of a giant behemoth, and then – a fire-spitting dragon. Flames shot out of the hole from which we had crawled: projectiles shooting from a barrel of gunpowder that had been sent after us. For a moment, I looked into a distorted mirror and saw the grotesque reflection of past events. The grotto of Locmaria. Porthos hurling a burning barrel at our persecutors. Rocks falling and crushing the Titan. The Duke of Alameda rising from the apocalypse like phoenix from an inferno. Furious vortices of sulphur and nitre, devouring shoals of fire which caught every object, the terrible thunder of the explosion rolled from that cavern of horrors. The stones split like planks of wood beneath the axe. A jet of fire, smoke, and debris sprang from the castle guts, enlarging as it mounted. Heat shot past our group and scorched the trees that grew on the slope. The way back into the castle had been barred.

“I must go back.” I lowered the handkerchief which I had whipped out to press to my mouth and nose when fire and smoke had been billowing out. “Grimley, Bartleby, you get him to safety.”

In the woods, the wolves howled, drowning out my words.

“You should come with us, sir,” Grimley said, watching me intently, his face drawn. “Kyrios said he wished it. He will be all right.” He looked past me, taking in the looming shape of the castle.

“I’m surprised at you, Grimley.” I thrust my handkerchief into my pocket. “Is it not your life’s mission to protect him?”

“To obey him, sir.” He sounded meek and more scared than ever, eyes darting to my face and drawing away over and over again.

I snorted. “You’ve chosen a great moment to remember that particular aspect of your duty.” I turned on my heel. “Get him to safety. Get him a peasant or two, he’ll be all right in the morning.”

“That might be too late,” Bartleby’s voice floated up from the vicinity of the cart. “There isn’t a breath of life left in him, nor a drop of blood. He will be in no condition to bite and suck.”

I snarled. What did the leprechaun know about biting and sucking, about that white-hot urge that blossomed and burned in every fibre of the body? Fury rose within me, and I rose with it, the folds of my coat flapping around me as I towered above my lackey who stared up at me with unflinching gaze from behind his spectacles. “Get me my bag!” I snarled at him. Bartleby blinked. A moment later, he was holding out my emergency kit to me, which he must have stowed in his vestments. I tore it open, retrieved a syringe and beckoned Grimley to me. “Your arm.”

He took off his coat and rolled up his sleeve. The vein throbbed in the crook of his elbow, and the scent of his Olympian blood hurt my nose, rasping over raw nerves like a nail over fresh scar tissue. I jabbed the needle in none too gently, extracted a syringe full of blood, withdrew the instrument and pushed the tip into the withered jugular of Dracula. It gave a faint throb. I repeated the operation two more times. As the transfusion went on something like life seemed to come back to poor Dracula’s cheeks. The desiccated lips plumped and parted. I removed the syringe, rose to my feet and turned to go.

“That will do. Feed him, Grimley.”

The Olympian guardian stared at me. “Aramis!”

I whirled around. “ _What_?”

“Don’t-”

Bartleby’s hand shot from within darkness, closing around Grimley’s arm and pulling him back, into the shadows.

“We will do as you say, doctor.”

“Good.” I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. A tear appeared in the leather of my glove where my fang had snagged in it. “ _Go_.”

***

**Wuthscheid Castle, December 1, 1870**

The hunters had followed the trail of Vlad’s blood, which led them past the chapel and the staircase leading up into the tower. I could not suppress a laugh then, when upon being forced to ascend that winding stairwell, I found myself being ushered into the same cage in which a mere two years earlier Aramis made me fall apart with his mouth and his beautiful cock.

“Something amusing, count von _Fulger_?” Van Helsing’s taunting tones brought me out of my pleasant reveries as the lock slipped into place behind me.

The _Fulger_ , such as it was, had failed me. Was it that on the Night of the Wolf, in this part of the world, still steeped in its own gods and legends, my own powers ceded to home advantage? Or was it something more simple than that? On the previous occasions, when the power of lightning had gathered in the palms of my hands, Aramis had been there, and it was he who ruled my emotional compass. I thought back to our conversation in Kringa, when he had said that drinking my blood had made him tender-hearted. He had brushed it off at the time, but what if he had been right all along? What if his powers had been augmented by my blood, and what if my own powers had drawn strength from him? 

“If I could trouble you from your daydreams to answer some questions then?” Van Helsing smirked, dragging the barrel of his pistol over the bars of the cage, as if the sound of his voice alone was not sufficient assault upon my delicate ears.

“If you hurt me,” I spoke, fighting down my irritation, “you will have powers more implacable than myself to answer to.”

“Do you mean Dracula?”

“I mean my family.” I smiled at him in a way that was far from benevolent. For a moment, he looked caught off guard. “We have more in common than you realize, you and I,” I continued. “For one thing, we were both born on Thira.”

“Thira,” he repeated, standing close enough to the cage to look right at me and yet just out of my reach. “When you say that, you mean the island. When I saw you, the night you and the vampires came to Santorini, I knew you were something else entirely.”

With those words, he unloaded his pistol right into my chest.

“Affrontery!” I remarked, as the bullet fell crushed at my feet.

“Your arm is bleeding,” he nodded towards the wound that, in all truth, was already beginning to close up. “You _can_ be made to bleed!”

“Oh, _can_ I ever!” I exclaimed in a surge of elation. “But I’m afraid I only bleed for those I hold dearest to me, and young Vangelis, I do not count you among their number.”

“Tell me where you have hidden the vampire!”

“I told you. He’s not here.”

“On Santorini, there were three of you.”

“The third one wasn’t a vampire. Could you not tell?”

“What was he, then?”

“A Titan. My good sir, must I state such an obvious thing as that?” I saw no reason to keep this a secret, since I had already resolved to dispatch Van Helsing to his maker as soon as I deemed it suitable. 

“Is he here too? Is he protecting the vampire?”

“He would be a rather easy man to spot around these parts, if he were here. Which he’s not.”

Van Helsing took one of the old, rusty spears from the wall and pointed it at me. A tremor of anticipation ran over his accomplices as they stirred from their positions, waiting for him to strike, like hungry hyenas awaiting their opportunity to scavenge.

“I have no quarrel with you, as you’ve said, son of Zeus,” Van Helsing spoke again. “Tell me where to find Dracula and I will set you free.”

“Do you have the time?” I asked idly. “I’ve stopped carrying a pocket watch some time ago. It just seemed like such an overindulgence. Did you know, I once sat on the shores of the Styx for a century and a half? Just… waiting, really. I had no doubt, not a single one, that my lover would come for me. Not even after a century and a half.”

The spear struck through the bars and glanced off my abdomen.

“Hades’ balls, man! Don’t you think you ought to change your tactic?” I crossed my arms and shook my head with glaring disappointment.

“Eventually I will find a way to hurt you,” Van Helsing hissed. “I owe you that much at least for your part in what happened that night on Santorini!”

“What happened on Santorini was the restoration of universal order, and if your brain is still too puerile to understand that…” My lecture was interrupted by another spear thrust, this time aimed at my head. It glanced off my helmet and Van Helsing, unable to see it too, growled. “Incredible impertinence, young man!”

“I can always entomb you some place where you will never be found, where you can languish alone in darkness, for all eternity,” the hunter hissed, his whole body trembling.

“Well, that would be a suitably Olympian punishment,” I conceded. “But I already told you: I’m very good at waiting. I would say ‘Patience of a Saint’, really, had I ever put any stock in saints.”

The old lance struck out again, this time finding the soft, yielding flesh of my unprotected thigh. A gash opened up, to Van Helsing’s great surprise, and crimson blossomed around the torn fabric of my breeches. It appeared he had hit my femoral artery.

“Well, I assure you, that had been a mistake,” I said.

Van Helsing laughed. Laughter distorted his features even more than his grotesque smile ever did.

“Where is the vampire?” he asked again, baring his own teeth at me. 

In the distance, I heard a distinct howling of several wolves. I moved to the back of the cage, pressing my back against the same stones where I had given myself to Aramis, and sank gradually to the floor where my blood began to slowly pool beneath my thigh.

“Wait,” I replied. 

“Wait for what?!” Van Helsing shouted, besides himself with rage.

“For Death,” I responded with a smile.

***

The ground between the trees where the undergrowth was thick was free from snow. Boots of supple leather moved from one black patch to the next, noiseless amidst the noises of the night. The howling had drawn nearer; the melody wafted down into the valley and spiralled towards the sky like smoke. Hunchbacked, bristly dwarves crouched in the shadows of many-limbed giants as the forest showed its true face under the silvery gaze of the moon. In the dark, a blue flame blossomed. Its tendrils slithered from behind a tree and licked up, up, suffusing the air with a light that was not of this Earth, luring in the wanderer who had strayed away from the path of the Christian god.

Outside the circle of the flame, darkness watched with a hundred black eyes. The susurrus of the winds had joined in the song of the wolves, rustling through the naked branches and breathing saturnine whispers into the ears of the wanderer.

Simara stared them down with eyes just as black, and smiled the smile from which the Olympian guardian had recoiled. Here, on the soil from which he had been born, he ruled supreme. The black eyes of darkness and the silver-grey eyes of the demons and pagan godlings that had been banished into the caverns beneath the earth and dwelled amidst the roots of ancient trees followed his every step. His sabre rested in its sheath; he had no use of it tonight. An archangel no longer, he was strigoi mort. He was vârcolac. He joined in the song of the wild, his mouth open, his teeth gleaming, and the words formed by his voice like crushed velvet were as ancient and primal as those that rose from the throats of the wolves.

He had circled the castle walls once, searching for a weakness in the sheer stone wall. When he emerged from the shelter of the trees, the light of the moon fell on his face and illumined skin as luminous as finest pearl. Two black holes in the smooth mask indicated where eyes should be. The tails of his greatcoat flattered in the wind like giant wings, two hands clenched into talons by his sides, and another smile slashed his face, teeth glinting like shards of diamonds.

Behind him, three shades slunk from the undergrowth, growing bulkier as they approached. Four-legged and furry, there was something human about them – more human than the man-shaped creature that they followed and that threw its head back and opened its mouth in a hiss.

They straightened as they walked, shoulder muscles bulging, legs lengthening, snouts that sniffed the ground sniffing the air instead. In the circle of moonlight, three figures stood: human in appearance, with skin of bronze and muscles of iron, nude and terrible like something risen from the ancient well whence humanity had once emerged.

Suddenly, Simara threw open his arms, his body bent backwards, taut like the string of a bow, his eyes locked on the target that they pierced like arrows: the tower where the prisoner was kept. Silvery shapes wound around the tall structure, gliding through the air on the wings of the wyvern. One moment guardians of the Dragon King, wisps of smoke the next. The serpents had come, summoned by a mind focused on one thing alone.

“Blood,” one of the bronze figures said. “I can smell it too: Olympian blood, the blood of a god. They hurt Uncle Discord. _Revenge_ ,” a soft whisper, as Simara struck, body darting forward, wings spread, talons poised. “Revenge will be sweet,” the Goddess of Just Retribution said. “Let us wait, brothers, for those who escape him, they will come running into the woods.”

Terror and Fear smiled.

***

It had crawled in through the narrow slits of the dungeon’s window and descended upon the room on silent wings as swift as the wind, its movements too quick to be captured by human eyes, its cry deafening as it echoed against the stones of the tower.

It fell upon the hunters as night falls upon the mountains of Carpathia.

I saw the last of the men expire with a guttural cry and his throat was torn to shreds. His blood sprayed the walls like some grotesque fountain. The creature’s claws dragged along the stone floor, until it seized the victim by the hair, and tore his head clean off with a violent roar. The severed head rolled close to the cage, and in the distorted features that had formed a final, silent laughter, I had recognized Van Helsing.

Then the creature turned towards my cage and my heart sank.

Its face had been stained with blood, its entire mouth and chin covered in it, dripping down the neck, staining what was left of the collar. But despite having been transformed into that… that _thing_... it had still been… I had recognized Aramis.

His nostrils flared; he threw himself against my cage. It rattled under the assault and I stepped back, watching with paralyzing horror as his fingers wrapped around the bars keeping me imprisoned. Keeping me safe from him.

But no, never from him. Aramis had told me - he could get anywhere, get to anyone, as long as he sensed his prey. That _thing_ , the thing he had turned into the night he came for me in Marienburg, I had never seen it this way before, but I recognized it for what it was. It claimed him, it demanded _blood_. My blood.

The cage creaked, the hinges surrendered under the onslaught, and the door flew against the heavy stones of the tower wall.

He took a step into my cage, chest heaving, mouth opened so that I could see the blood of my would-be tormentors drip slowly from his extended fangs. A sound closer to a growl than to human speech escaped the back of his throat and his eyes glowed, fixed upon my face.

“My angel,” I spoke in a trembling voice. “My sweet angel, you came for me.”

Another growl as he advanced slowly, his eyes glued to my neck, and I swallowed.

“This is all my fault,” I said aloud. “I know it is. You had to do this to come for me. But you did come.” He craned his neck to the side and his teeth pressed together. Each breath rattled his nostrils like a wolf gone mad with the hunt. “You always come for me,” I said the words that he would not, could not say. 

Tears stung my eyes. _You never really saw the stains on my soul, Athos_ , I remembered him saying to me once. _Probably because your own is so pure._ He had spoken those words during a time when I had not thought myself in love with him. Had I been willfully blind, even then? I had seen him kill, maim, destroy, but I had never seen the monster inside him. I had never seen _this_.

“You always come for me,” I repeated, like a mantra. “Aramis.”

His name upon my lips had been the trigger. My recognition had shaken and threatened him, and he lunged at me, the impact of his body slamming me against the bars of the cage. My hands struggled against his grasp, even as his talons sunk into my skin and drew rivulets of blood.

“ _Blood_ ,” he hissed in a voice that had not been human. His head tossed to the side where our hands were clasped and he licked at the dark liquid drops running down over my wrists.

“Aramis…”

He growled and heaved me to the floor, throwing himself on top of me.

“ _Blood!_ ”

And then his teeth tore at my throat.

I shut my eyes. I did not want to see him this way. I did not want to _feel_ him this way, more beast than man. Where had my beloved gone if this darkness had claimed him? He snarled against me, tearing my flesh with his fangs. His hands clutched at my hair, cutting even through the pain, and I tensed my body against his following attempt - to rip my head off.

“Angel, please,” I whispered, to the extent I could still speak.

I had not been keen on growing an entirely new body. Or, for that matter, a new head. But more importantly, I did not want any shred of him to remember having done that. I still hoped I could bring him back from _this_ , whatever this was, but I wasn’t certain I could bring him back from tearing me to shreds.

 _But if you were to ever_ see _it, to truly know the darkness inside me, you would turn from me in horror. You would abandon me._ His words, his own words, they pursued me, they haunted me even in the throes of pain. He had been right to fear the darkness inside him, but I too had been right when I had answered him.

_Never!_

“My love,” I whispered, and instead of pushing him away, I pulled him closer. I wrapped my arms around him, and I held his mouth to the gushing wound in my neck, just as I had done when he had last resurrected me back in Hellas. “I love you.”

The claws clutching at my head loosened and his breath came hot and steady against my neck. He whimpered and emitted a sound that was akin to a wounded animal’s cry.

“I love you,” I repeated, feeling his body uncoiling over mine. Another wail, another whimper, and then he scampered off of me, and pressed himself into the corner of the cage, frightened and lost. “It’s all right,” I whispered, crawling up onto all fours. My head spun from loss of blood which was not replenishing as fast as I would have wished. My chest ached and my vision blurred. I stretched out my hand towards him. “It’s going to be all right,” I said, trying to convince myself as much as him.

He bared his teeth at me, clearly unconvinced, but did not move from the corner.

“Don’t go anywhere,” I said, getting up on trembling legs and looking about the tower for the hunters’ accoutrements left scattered in their wake. Silver chains. There was never anything inherently magical connecting silver and vampires but the restraints would have to do.

I gathered up the chains and manacles and returned to the demolished cage where my feral flittermouse still awaited me. Despite his transformed visage and the blood that covered him, his expression that was more beast than man, he still managed to look beautiful. He also looked exhausted. He sniffed at the air with a sudden burst of defiance and tried to scramble back up to his feet.

“Down,” I said, forcing him back against the bars of the cage that had been meant as my own tomb. He growled at me but did not try to bite. “I’m sorry about this, love,” I spoke softly, running my hand over his hair as one would soothe a wildling horse. “But I can’t have you wandering off right now.” Another whimper, as he tried to draw his wrists away, tried to fold his arms around himself as if they really had been flittermouse wings. “Aramis,” I almost wept, “this is killing me. Please.” I clasped the manacles over his wrists, and those bottomless black eyes fixed me with a look of abject betrayal. “I’m so sorry, my love. I have to.”

I passed the chains between the bars, pulling his arms away from his torso and securing them at a cross. I left the chains loose enough so that he could slide down onto the floor, like some kind of a sitting, crucified Christ. He hung his head and a sound very much like a human sob escaped him.

I sank down by his side and tried to wipe the blood off his face with my sleeve. His mouth opened and moved as if to catch my hand, then shut again.

“Listen to me,” I spoke, lifting his chin so that I could look into his eyes again. “I know you can hear me.” I tried to soften my voice, my thumb pressed tentatively against his lower lip, that I had kissed more times than I could count, and would kiss again. “You’re mine, Aramis. You will always be mine. No matter what. Do you understand me?”

He blinked, and two blood-tears streaked down his face. My soul could not bear it anymore, and so I lay down on the floor next to him, placing my head into his lap and wrapping my arms around his extended legs. If anyone had found us like this, we may have resembled a sort of a grotesque Pietà.

“I will never leave you,” I said, closing my eyes, and praying for sleep to claim me.


	10. What Never Dies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We did it! Thank you, Audience, for sticking with us on this unexpected journey and awfully big adventure. Let's face it: we would not have finished it without you.
> 
>  
> 
> **Warning: Character Death**

**Wuthscheid Castle, December 1, 1870**

“Are you here?”

“I am,” I stirred and pushed myself up on the elbow. I lay in a pool of my own dried blood.

“Am I?”

“You’re here. You’re back.” 

His face rested in between the palms of my hands, cheeks still streaked with red where the tears of blood had run rivulets the night before. Above our heads a shy ray of Aurora illumed the darkness of the tower. Strewn about, the bodies of the slaughtered hunters were a feast for flies, who sat astride the corpses and rubbed their short forearms together with savage glee. I looked back towards my beloved.

“Is this real?”

“Only if you want it to be,” I smiled at him, smoothing my hand down his black curls that felt cold and damp underneath my fingers.

I scrambled to unlock the chains that bound his arms to the bars when his head butted softly against my own and his lips brushed my ear. “Don’t.”

“Aramis?”

“I’m not ready yet.”

His eyes were closed, his lashes casting long shadows along his pale cheeks.

“You’re soaked in blood,” he whispered, refusing to look up at me. “I can smell it all over your clothes.”

“Did you want me to remove them?” I asked, only to have my lips caught with his own, his mouth lured me in, his tongue kept me there, clinging to that kiss as if it was the last thread of my immortality. “Aramis,” I gasped for air, my hands clutching at his neck, his shoulders, his hair, “I love you!”

A soft moan flew like a bird in between my lips and mingled with my breath as I kissed him. His teeth, returned to their usual shape and whiteness, chewed gently at my lips and clicked against my own with renewed vigor.

“Please, take me,” he whispered. Again, I reached for the key to unlock the chains but he shook his head. “Like this.”

I ran my hands down his neck and chest where his clothes lay in tatters, as if demolished by wild beasts. What had he gone through, my beloved, while I bided my time in this cage that had no right to hold me?

“Don’t look at me like that,” his lips moved against my forehead.

“Like what?” I asked, quietly, pressing my hand to the naked skin of his chest. It felt cool to my touch. Inside his ribcage, his heartbeat felt steady and calm.

“With pity.”

“This isn’t pity,” I shook my head and lifted my eyes to his. “This is awe.”

With a shrug of my shoulders, I shed the rest of my vestments and pulled my shirt over my head. My skin underneath was sticky and itchy from dried blood, and I hesitated before passing my discarded shirt down my front to wipe at myself in a somewhat desperate and haphazard fashion.

“Come here,” he beckoned. “Are you healed?”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and pressed my cheek against his, bringing my neck within reach of his mouth. His tongue passed slowly over the newly healed skin, sending a shiver through my ligaments until my entire body shuddered.

“I --”

I pressed my fingers over his mouth, not needing to hear an apology from him. He moaned softly into my hand, his lips caressing the pads of my fingers.

“I told you, I will never leave you.” Breath caught in his throat, expanding the soft skin of his neck in a sudden gasp, while I pressed my lips against the tremors of his Adam’s apple and kissed the groove between his collarbones.

“You saw..,” he attempted again once my hand slipped from his lips to trail down until I found the buttons of his breeches.

“I only saw that you came for me.”

“But you _saw_ it!”

“I saw it,” I nodded and looked into the darkness of his eyes. “And I’m here.”

“You love me,” he said, with a catch in his breath and a half smile that lit up his features.

“You imbecile, I’ve been telling you this for centuries!” My hand finally snuck inside the heat of his breeches. “Not even hard for me, Aramis?” I frowned.

“I had a difficult night,” he snarled, nipping at my lower lip.

My fingers wrapped around the shaft of his cock, pulling it out into the cool air of the tower. Aramis hissed and strained against the chains, his fingers clasping and unclasping. In the palm of my hand, his flesh filled with blood and grew tumescent.

“There’s my chyortik,” I laughed, pushing my own breeches down my hips. Aramis’ eyes took in my body appreciatively as I stepped out of the pile of crumpled clothing.

My head spun. I wanted to call for Grimley to clean up the fly-ridden bodies, but Grimley, for once, was nowhere to be found. And there was Aramis, still chained to the bars, disheveled and barely back from feralness, yet somehow managing to look at me with all the composure of a bishop and the predatory glare of a wolf.

“ _God_ , I want you.” I sank down over his lap, pressing my arms through the bars and across his back. “Look at me.”

“Jesus… _fuck_.” His cock twitched against my cleft as I rubbed myself in small circles against his lap and pressed my lips against his.

“I saw you last night,” I panted, sucking my own fingers into my mouth to coat them with saliva. “Do you see me?” I reached behind me to hastily open myself for him. 

“ _God! _” His arms trembled against the bars. Behind me, his rampant cock stabbed into my lower back.__

__“After everything you’ve been through, Aramis,” I whispered hotly against his panting and opened lips, “after everything you’ve seen and everything you’ve forgotten - you will remember _this_!”_ _

__I clung to his shoulders as I shut my eyes and lowered myself over his cock, slowly letting his pulsating, heated flesh stretch and fill me, until I was fully seated with him inside me, and I felt his sack flush against the hard press of my sitz bones._ _

__“My god!” he exclaimed again, his head thrown back and hitting the metal bars with a dull thud._ _

__“Which one?” I grit through my teeth, lifting up and slamming down over his cock again. I took his mouth with mine, I kissed his lips, his tongue, the very teeth of his as I rode him._ _

__“I only have one,” he breathed against me. “There has only ever been one.”_ _

__I smiled into the skin of his neck, my breath caressing his earlobe. My thighs trembled as I thrust down and against him, clenching around his cock with possessive intensity that threatened to boil me from within. My own cock dragged wetly against his abs where sweat pooled against the dry patches of blood._ _

__“There has ever only been you,” he added with a whimper._ _

__I growled as my hands discharged voltage after voltage against the iron bars of the cage. The current ran through us both, making our hair rise until I forced my fingers to let go and grab Aramis instead. His abdomen was slicked with my emissions and his eyes were glowing like thunderclouds in a storm._ _

__I opened my mouth to say something but closed it, knowing that for what had just happened, the human language did not possess sufficient words, and I slumped against him, waiting for my own heartbeat to even out._ _

____

***

It had been easy to kill a god.

They were pagan creatures, those Hellenic deities: drawn to darkness and depravity like flies to carrion. Humanity had not dressed them up in pristine white and glowing halos, like Christian gods and saints. They were as base as mortals who crawled upon the face of the earth, born of mud and of blood and forged in the fires of pain and suffering. Their sins were the sins of humans, only bigger and more terrifying, and their punishment and fall was greater than that of humans: a human who died might be born to immortality; a god who died faded into the darkness of _nihil_.

He had come to me, lured in by the darkness of my soul and the glowing radiance of my eyes and smile. He had followed me into darkness seeking to understand my nature. Seeking to cajole me, to tease the pretty new Slavic demon that had emerged unscathed from the dank graveyard in which other ancient godlings had perished forever. I had stood concealed, my face in the shadows and my eyes gleaming from above the folds of my cloak. Once he took a first step into my domain, he was pushed into my arms by a power greater and older than the Olympian gods. He fell, and I greeted him with claws and teeth that tore through the human skin that he wore like daggers. Ichor pure rushed into my mouth, into my head, explosions of light and sound blasting within my skull, _To battle, Achaeans, to battle!_

In the borderland between light and dark, Porthos had lowered his Titanic fist. Kydoimos had lain dead.

Why, then, did the din still linger? There were no words, just a rattle, a crackle that buzzed in my ears, like the last breath of dying crickets, like the whisper of dunes when the endless grains of sand trickled down, down into eternity, like the sizzling of electricity that flitted along the metal wire and sparkled in the fingertips of Athos.

_Athos._

The thud of his heart reverberated against my body, drowning out the noise that still rang in my skull. Athos lay slumped against me, one arm curled around my neck, my head, cradling me to him, fingers glued to my hair with blood. Blood, blood everywhere, the blood of men who lay slain and strewn around us. I caught sight of one gloved hand clenched around the handle of a large-bore revolver. Ah yes, the American. I wrinkled my nose as the odour of his blood assaulted my nostrils. Primitive upstart who’d fancied himself a great saviour of the oppressed and whose blood had tasted like slop, even when it was spiked with rage and fear.

“Good morning, angel.” The soft whisper against my temple, lips that moved with familiar reverence along the ridge of my jaw, a hot kiss pressed to the corner of my mouth. His body was waking up from the stupor into which it had fallen after the frenzied mating at dawn. My wrists manacled, chains winding around my flesh and bones and around the iron bars, I had lain in a tangled heap as Athos’ strong hands covered the sides of my ribcage, travelled along my chest with broad strokes, holding me down, pulling me up, and his mouth closed around my then-spent cock. He waited, patient and unwavering like a rock, until my aching flesh relaxed under his caresses and my cock began to fill for him again, hardening against his tongue and his teeth, throbbing under the pressure of his lips. His hair was matted with sweat and blood, his shoulders were covered in a brown crust where his blood had dried on his skin. The muscles in his arms flexed as he shifted me, lifting my hips up, up, until my cock made him gag and he had to come up for air, gasping. He thrust his fingers into my mouth as I thrust my cock into his, the slick slide of skin on skin, and heat built deep within my abdomen and exploded, as I writhed on the filthy floor beneath Athos.

He had not unlocked the manacles. My arms were numb, stretched above my head and trapped under the weight of my own body and his. I could not feel my fingers, not even when Athos fumbled for the key and removed the chains at last and started to rub life back into me.

The skin at the side of his neck was scarred; he hadn’t had time to heal fully yet, not from _that_.

“You’re hurt,” I whispered, dragging my gaze from one patch of dried blood to another, down his torso, down to his cock that had swollen to semi-hardness again as he knelt between my thighs.

Athos smiled, lifted my hand to his mouth and kissed my fingertips. A sharp tingle, like a spark of electricity, ran up my arm, and I shivered. “Not anymore.”

I pushed myself up, wincing at the pain as much as at the sight of my bruised, bloodied body. “I could have killed you.”

“You couldn’t.”

“Why did you not,” I said, anger rising to drown out shame, “why did you not defend yourself?”

“Against _you_?”

“Against them.” I gestured towards the scattered bodies, but my arm fell back limply, and Athos caught my wrist. “Are you not a powerful god? What happened to thunderhands?”

Suddenly, he looked embarrassed. “I don’t know,” he said, biting his lip. “I tried, but the power deserted me. If you think about it, it only ever worked when I protected you.”

“Or _fucked_ me.”

Athos laughed shakily. “Yes. That, too. So you see, chyortik mine, you are the source of my powers.” He leaned in and kissed me on the forehead. “Always,” he purred.

Bitterness rose within my throat, neither vomit nor bile; tears, I realised, tucking my head under his chin and pressing my mouth into the soft hollow at the base of his throat. I swallowed and his arms closed around me like protective wings, rocking me gently. Rocking the memories asleep that churned inside my head: the darkness around me and within me; the overwhelming rush as unimaginable power rushed through me, propelling me towards him; the earth splitting apart and the veil tearing open to let the ancient, long-buried rulers of these lands back in. They had stirred from their sleep in the Night of the Wolf, and my presence had titillated them. The wolves had run with me, and the serpents had wound round and round with a rustling of scales, hissing, spitting, rattling and crackling-

I frowned. “Can you hear that noise?”

“What noise?” Athos kissed me on the top of my head, and I wriggled out of his arms, gently. We both looked around. The torn and broken bodies lay as still as only the dead can. I had seen flies feast on them – or something that I had taken for flies, as it was too cold for real flies. The wind had thrust in snow through the window, and Athos’ skin was cold under my hands. Where were they now?

“I heard something,” I muttered. “Like… a gurgle, the death rattle of hundreds of tiny throats.”

He passed his hand over my face, thumb ghosting over my forehead in a gesture of blessing. I closed my eyes momentarily and my lashes brushed against his palm. “Is it gone?” he asked.

“It’s fading.”

“Good.” Athos’ nude body moved against mine, muscles throbbing with life under my tentative touch. “Because I can hear something else. Outside.” He reached for a rag in which I recognised my tattered cloak. I heard it too: the sound of footsteps and of paws, scrabbling over stones.

The door opened and Grimley stepped in, prim and stone-faced. No traces of the fear that had him in its grip last night remained. He looked as if he’d come in to serve us our breakfast, and for a moment, I was surprised to see that he carried no tray.

“There you are, sirs,” he said and his gaze quivered on me for a moment longer than usual. “You are both well, I assume?”

“Very well, thank you, Grimley,” Athos said, wrapping himself into the cloak with a regal gesture and throwing its folds over me. “Do you bring any news from Vlad?”

“Indeed, Kyrios.” He approached us, heels clicking on bare stone and squelching on human remains. “Master Vlad is quite recovered. He left us to give chase after some men who lurked in the forest, but I am confident that he will return to us safely.”

“You let him go?” The roll of thunder rose in Athos’ voice. “Alone?”

“If I hadn’t, he would have insisted to come with me, and this is not a scene with which I would wish a young impressionable mind like his to be confronted.” Rather than looking pointedly at the carnage around us, he fixed his insolent stare at the tableau that Athos and I presented.

“What happened to the men who ran away?” I interjected, for I remembered the fire of disappointment cutting through me like a red-hot sword when some of the hunters escaped.

“They are accounted for.”

The door opened wider, and three snouts poked inside, broad doggie grins spread across their lupine faces. Now that the Night of the Wolf was over, the sacrifice completed and the pounding blood becalmed, the Hellenic deities had not enough power to manifest in their human form in Transylvania. They came in sniffing, tails wagging, and one tried to push its nose into Athos’ crotch. I smacked the insolent snout, and it cowered and backed away. Chomping noises from behind Athos’ back told me that Ares’ children had started to dispose of the evidence.

“Where is Bartleby?” I asked.

“He’s busy organising everything for sirs’ return.” Grimley had stooped down and began unpacking a bundle that he’d conjured up from within his vestments. “I did not bring any boots, because I assumed that they were the elements of sirs’ wardrobe most likely to survive the night.” I glared at him, but he continued, undeterred, “I’m afraid some of M. le duc’s… associates got a bit too frisky, and Bartleby had to whack them over the – for lack of a better word – _head_ with his shovel. They too had to be disposed of.”

“M. le duc’s?” Athos frowned.

“He means the Duke of Alameda,” I growled through gritted teeth, shoving my leg into the proffered riding breeches.

“Oh, right.”

He stood. I stood before him, and we looked at each other, the feeding wolves and the scowling Grigori forgotten.

A smile blossomed on Athos’ face, lighting up his eyes and filling my heart with divine flames. He stretched out his hand and I laid mine in his without thinking. Then, he put his arms around my neck and kissed me, gently, as if for the first time. “Come with me.” Like all those centuries ago in Snagov: a gentle supplication, nothing like the summoning of a demon. I threaded my fingers through his and pressed my thumb to the inside of his wrist, where his pulse throbbed with the life that flowed through his veins. And, like all those centuries ago, I obeyed. I followed him wherever he would lead me, even onto death.

***

**Paris, December 2, 1870**

When Mr Mackay came from England to pick up his daughter, he was surprised at the change that the months spent in a Parisian convent had worked in her. Gone was the sullen, highly strung adolescent; in her place, he was presented with a poised young lady, who didn’t hunch her shoulders, mumble and blush. She looked him straight in the eye, kissed him on both cheeks and called him ‘Papa!’ in a clear young voice that vibrated with laughter. The eyes were those of his daughter, but the wit and intelligence that sparkled in them were new. How had Victor Hugo called it in his novel? _A rose perceives that it is an engine of war._ She did, and he was quite amused, beaming with parental pride.

“It was good of you to send me to Paris, Papa,” Minnie was saying as they walked arm in arm in the garden. “I am quite grown up, am I not?” Minnie? Oh no, Minnie no longer! She had outgrown the childhood nickname; she was Marie now, elegant and feminine in her long dress and the new fur coat that he had bought her. Dark ringlets spilled from beneath the hood, and her face was flushed from the cold.

“I shall go back to England with you,” she was saying gaily. “I very much look forward to it. But oh, Papa!” she exclaimed and grasped his arm more tightly. With her other hand, she was shielding her eyes against the sun, and he too narrowed his eyes and lowered his head to peer out from the shadow cast by the brim of his hat. From the glaring white light of the winter sun, a figure emerged, walking towards them. He saw the silhouette of a woman, her cape as white as the snow, and when she reached them, she and Marie exchanged a delighted smile.

“Papa!” his daughter was saying, “May I present to you my dearest friend, Miss Bertha Vyver.” The woman directed her dark gaze at him and smiled. He smiled back, staring into eyes that reminded him of a dream he’d had.

“Bertha has been very good to me, Papa,” Marie was saying, quite serious now. “I should like her to come to England with us, as my companion. You will agree, won’t you?”

He did. What else was there to do?

“ _Dearest_ Papa!” Marie said. “You will not regret it. From now on, I shall be the best daughter you’ve ever had.”

***

**Transylvania, December 4, 1870**

It had taken us days to wash away the grime that clung to us since the Night of the Wolf. Soaking our bodies in a vat that Bartleby had procured and Grimley kept filled with hot water, we languished for hours on end. My legs wrapped around him as he reclined against me in the water; cold drops dripping on my skin from his wet hair when he rested his chin on my shoulder; the palm of his hand cupping my hipbone, fingertips ghosting over the fading bruises on my upper thigh, where I had slammed into the wall as I climbed to save him. One day, we would have to talk about the Night of the Wolf; but for now, silence reigned, interspersed with soft sighs and whispers, the ‘I love yous’ spoken in every language at our command.

One day, I knew, he would confront me. That night had been the first time that he had witnessed the primal, terrifying power that lay dormant within me with his own eyes. The exhilarating ecstasy that swept me away when I unleashed the forces I had drawn from earth and blood over the centuries of my existence. I was as powerful as the prey I hunted, I knew that now. I ran my hands down Athos’ chest as he lay in my arms in the water and nipped at the side of his neck with my teeth. His head rolled to the side, and I licked the spot that I had torn open a few nights ago. I had not drunk from his neck since then.

“Do it,” he murmured lazily, chasing my fingers in the water with his hand. I pulled my knees up, trapping his body between my legs, and bit down on the taut ligaments without breaking them.

Athos choked out a laugh. “You tease!” he gasped. “Do it properly, Aramis. It is yours.”

“Not here.”

His skin was so tender still. It felt almost like those early days, when he was just a demigod and his healing powers were not as great as my greed. It had taken him more than one day to heal, and I had stayed by his side and held his cold body in my arms.

“Where then?” His legs fell open and he rubbed his thigh against mine, showing me the vulnerable inside of his thigh, where the skin was thin and the pulse of blood was strong. My cock twitched against his loins and he smirked. “Yes?”

“Not now.” I lifted his hand to my mouth instead and sucked in his fingers, one after the other, very slowly, circling each joint with the tip of my tongue, teasing the delicate skin between his fingers, feeling his pulse quicken and his fingertips begin to throb. Those sensitive fingertips, the skin so soft still as if he were a youth whose hands had never known hardship and war. I reached the finger with the pale ring-shaped scar and kissed it, closing my eyes as I did so.

His body tensed, twisted, as he craned his neck and kissed me on the spot beneath my ear. “My love.”

I turned his hand around and pressed my parted lips to his palm. Then, tracing the curve of his lifeline, my mouth travelled over the swell of the Mount of Venus, and clamped over the veins in his wrist. Athos’ body arched and he groaned hotly, hand clenching involuntarily, pumping blood back up his arm. Beneath my tongue, his veins swelled for me, blood rose to the surface, and all it took was one tiny pinprick with the tip of my fang and a rivulet of this most potent of potions surged between my lips.

My other hand found his cock, stiff and hard already, throbbing with the same pulse that was pumping blood into my mouth. He fucked himself into my fist as I drank him, hips undulating like the waves of the ocean, unstoppable, inexorable, and my cock slipped between his legs. His mouth lay panting against my neck, breathing hot damp air that scalded my skin, whispering terms of endearment and love. I wanted to fuck him and wanted to get fucked, and the impossibility to have it both ways made me groan in frustration.

“What?” Athos cupped my face, and blood seeped from his wrist and trickled down my cheek.

I told him what.

“Oh chyortik!” he laughed. “I’m sorry. If I were my father, I would find a way. But as it is, you will have to decide. Which should it be?” He rolled his hips, grinding against my cock, and I moaned.

“I want you,” I choked, lightheaded, as my senses overloaded. He turned around in my arms and we clung to each other, biting each other’s lips raw in our ferocious desire to devour the other with kisses.

“Turn around, my love,” he murmured, lifting himself off me. I clambered to my knees and, shivering, pressed my back into his chest. Athos was kissing my back, pushing my hair away until it hung like a black curtain around my face to nip at the nape of my neck. His wrist hadn’t stopped bleeding yet, hot blood sizzled on my skin as he stroked up and down my torso, arm curling around my ribcage so that he could rub my nipples. The heat of his mouth between my legs, hands spreading me for his tongue. I moaned and shivered, and my bones turned to gelatine as he began to lick me wet and open for his cock.

I did not see him reach for the oil that we’d added to our bathwater. Its smell hit me all of a sudden, and then his fingers, smooth and slick, sliding inside me, and my muscles spasmed. I hung before him on weak knees, gripping the rim of our bathtub with fingers that were going numb with the effort to support myself. The taste of his blood still clung to my lips, and flashes of light exploded in my skull, blinding me, for never before had the ichor of his veins been as potent as it was now. Something had happened to him, rendering him more powerful than ever. And even as the thick head of his cock began to squeeze itself into me, taking my breath away with its heft, its heat, I knew what it was:

Ares had not come. Athos was no longer an acolyte. No longer the adherent of another god, he had not summoned the deity whose protection he had enjoyed for millennia. He had sent the Dogs of War away. He had not talked to his brother since the shipwreck, not even in the hour of greatest need. There was nothing that Ares could offer him now, and we all knew it.

“Where are you, Aramis?” He draped himself over me, cock buried deep inside me, throbbing, thickening, filling me out. “Come back to me.” His hand on my cock, his tongue lapping at my ear, mouth pressing kisses to my jaw. I turned my head without opening my eyes and we kissed through the curtain of my hair. He pulled his hips back without breaking the kiss and shoved his cock back in, thumb dipping into the small of my back as I arched into the fuck.

“I’m here,” I panted, biting his lips. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“No.” Another slow undulation of withdrawing hips, and the quick, sharp slam back into me. “I love to fuck you so much.”

“Go on then,” I growled, my fangs snagging in the soft flesh on the inside of his lip. “Fuck me, Athos. Your cock – _fuck_!” I panted, struggling to get my breath back. “It’s so _huge_.”

The bathtub was almost entirely empty of water by the time we stumbled out, shivering as our arousal spiralled down and water cooled on our skin. We collapsed on the bed that, as I had remarked darkly, had borne all the marks of Vlad’s solicitous care. He was the only one who fluffed the pillows _just so_ and dimpled the eiderdown invitingly.

Vlad had waited for us at the inn when we’d returned from the castle. As expected, he threw himself into Athos’ arms, almost sobbing with relief. After releasing him, he turned to me, bowed, kissed my hand and then embraced me as well, knocking the air out of me while Athos watched us with the sweet, affectionate smile of a loving father. Despite our blood-stained appearance, the innkeeper and his wife had been happy to welcome us under their roof. The thrall started to fade on the next day and they took to wearing garlic wreaths and crosses around their necks, but we had grown quite used to the funny little ways of the local folk and ignored the insult.

“They are jumpy after the events in the castle,” Athos had said indulgently, lying on his side in post-coital haze and teasing my nipple with the tips of his finger.

“The _alleged_ events,” I pointed out and drank my wine. “It was all explained, remember? Bartleby demonstrated flash photography again, and Grimley explained how dynamite and steam power are used in tunnel and railway construction.”

“Hm.” Athos had tweaked my nipple and I yelped and spilled my wine, which he licked off my chest. “I think they prefer to believe it was all done by fearsome spirits.”

“Not all of them,” I said. “Some of the younger ones like to believe in reason rather than superstition. Don’t underestimate the power of words, my godling.” I set my glass aside and rolled over to face him, brushing a strand of hair from his face. “Remember the Romantics, Athos? They died because their words became too dangerous. The words of the new ones play right into our hands.”

“You set great store by that M. Verne, chyortik,” he smiled.

“Marie says he’s good.” I smiled back. “The nymph is rarely wrong.”

The nymph’s letter had arrived that night. There had been a knock at the window. Athos rose, and from the quiet conversation behind the curtain, I gathered that he spoke to one of the Anemoi. He closed the window, walked back to the bed and flung the envelope onto my chest. “For you.”

 _“Beloved cousin-german”_ , the nymph wrote. _“Our friend Porthos, who has lately arrived in Paris, tells me you are both well. And so am I! At last, after a long-lasting human affliction, which had annoyed me greatly, I am much revived and feel myself restored to my old self.”_

“She’s found a new body then,” Athos had muttered, grimacing in an exaggerated display of displeasure, as if he’d forgotten that he no longer was the reformed comte de La Fère of Bragelonne but rather the God of Discord. I glared at him in disapproval and he smirked. “Methinks the naughty nymph needs a spanking,” he whispered.

It took us a while to read the whole letter, in which Marie informed us that she and _Bertha_ were going to England. _“I cherish fond memories of those grey and foggy lands,”_ the nymph wrote. _“Albion is where I solemnly entered into my most recent marriage, which was an exceptionally good one. Tell me, M. l’abbé, as a man of the Church - am I perchance married still? If no divorce has taken place and neither of the spouses has died, surely this means that the count and I are man and wife ‘till death do us part’.”_

“A spanking is much too good for her,” I growled, until Athos found a way to calm me down.

 _“Porthos tells me,”_ the nymph continued, _“that your latest charge currently lives in England. Marion and I should very much like to meet him. When you write to him, please convey our regards and tell him that he is most welcome to pay us a visit whenever it suits his doubtlessly busy schedule. Since I am living in my Father's household, it would be wise if he came in the guise of a continental ecclesiastic, as to not arouse the suspicions of Papa and Step-Mama, to whom the chastity of their young daughter is naturally a great concern. I trust that you can advise him on the choice of the most suitable cassock. Something that will make him look aristocratic, yet not predatory.”_

“This new body,” Athos said, shaking his head, “strikes me as particularly reckless. I hope this is only juvenile high spirits and that the nymph will display the necessary decorum once she lives with her English family.”

“Hm,” I said, staring at the letter. “You know, Athos, this is not a bad idea.”

___“What isn’t?”_ _ _

___“Sending Vlad to them.”_ _ _

___“Have you lost your mind, my love?”_ _ _

___“Think about it.” Even as I spoke, the plan began to form in my head, and I knew with absolute certainty that it was what Marie had in mind. “Vlad wants to live in England, but if the recent events have proved anything it is that he’s not ready to live on his own. Do _you_ want to live in England?”_ _ _

___“Gods beware!”_ _ _

___“Very well. Why not send Vlad to Marie and Marion, who are better equipped than anyone else to take care of him? They will make sure that no harm comes to him and that he doesn’t wreak too much havoc.”_ _ _

___“How can you be so sure?”_ _ _

___I looked at him. “They did with me.”_ _ _

___“Oh.” He stared at me and then leaned in and kissed me. “Yes. Very well. Let’s do that.” He began to laugh softly, lips pressed against mine. “They will turn Dracula into a true English gentleman, top hat, deportment and all.”_ _ _

___“He needs a new name,” I gasped, Marie’s letter crumpled in my hand, my hips trapped under the weight of Athos’ body as he spread atop me, kissing me with open-mouthed urgency._ _ _

___“You’ll think of one,” he murmured. “You always do.”_ _ _

_____ _

***

**Puys, December 5, 1870**

I did not recall being in the Seine-Maritime district before, which was odd because between piracy, the revolution, and my life of leisure in the seventeenth century I had thought I had traversed the length and breadth of France. Still, I had never been to Puys.

“The one thing I have never learned to appreciate about the sea, Takoyaki,” I was telling my faithful boatswain and homme du chambre, “is the fucking sea gulls.” I inhaled a lungful of the marine scented air and bemoaned the stains on my hat. “Do you believe what they say?”

“About what, Captain?” Takoyaki brushed the bird shit off my hat with his own sleeve. 

“That it portends good luck?”

“If I had a shred of luck for every sea gull who had so assaulted me in passing flight, sir, I would be the luckiest man in the world. Not that I don’t thank my lucky stars for meeting you, Captain.”

“You’re a good man, Takoyaki,” I slapped his back and placed my surprisingly presentable hat back upon my head. “It is a good thing, indeed, that cows do not fly!”

It was here in Puys that my grandson, Alexandre Dumas _fils_ , held his home, and it was here that my grandson had apparently spirited his father away in his dotage.

How frail human bodies were! One moment, you thought yourself an immortal, a Titan among pygmies, a condor among hummingbirds, and the next… What had become of his fame and riches? What had become of the man? My son. The spark of life was going out in him, and I, as always, had lost track of time.

The woman who greeted me in the vestibule, presented to me as Marie-Alexandrine, had turned out to be another one of my grandchildren. I smiled at her and allowed her to take my newly clean hat.

“I have come to see your father, Mademoiselle,” I spoke kindly. “I am an old friend of his, from the Parisian days.”

“Monsieur, then you must have been quite young when you knew him,” she spoke and blushed crimson. She would have blushed all the more had she known she had been addressing her very own Grand-Da.

“You flatter me, my dear,” I responded and followed her down the corridor towards the patient’s quarters.

“He has been paralyzed since he’d suffered the stroke over the summer,” she spoke quietly, almost apologetically. “He can speak, with difficulty, but he will not be able to move. I am not sure if he will recognize you.”

I braced myself for the dolorous sight. “I understand. I merely wish to pay my respects.”

“Whom shall I announce, Monsieur…?”

“Du Phaëton,” I supplied and smiled to myself remembering the years I spent in Paris, lurking just out of sight, whilst watching my boy with a secret and all-encompassing pride from the shadows.

“Monsieur du Phaëton here to see you, papan.” She had curtsied in the most charming way and left us alone in the bedroom.

How he had aged! I scarcely recognized him. But a strange half-smile lit up his features as I entered, and his eyes reflected a gamut of emotion as I gingerly placed myself at his bedside and took his hand in mine.

“I apologize I couldn’t have come sooner,” I spoke, pressing his hand firmly. “I wanted to,” I continued, knowing it would be up to me to make most of the time we had left, “but there were circumstances quite out of my control.” His hand twitched inside my own, a valiant attempt by his fingers to press around mine. “There is so much that I have wanted to say to you…”

His mouth opened, the flame of recognition burned bright, and then, “I know… Da.”

I gasped and a tear rolled down my cheek, falling onto the sheets. “You know!” I exclaimed in a choked up voice. “Have you always known?”

His fingers tried to squeeze my hand again and the same half-smile enlivened his features.

“I was so proud of you, Alex,” I spoke in earnest, pressing his hand to my heart. “You do not know the half of it. I may be the one who lives forever, but you, my boy… _you_ are the true immortal of the two of us!” My words poured from my lips like a waterfall, attempting to get out while there was yet time, before Atropos cut the gilded thread. “Your legacy, your glorious legacy will continue long after the world has forgotten any of our other deeds. Take heart, Alex!”

He opened his mouth as if to speak. I could see that he had been waging a battle of choice, selecting which words were the most economical to convey what it was he had wanted to say. At last, he uttered, “Tell… the count… I’m sorry.”

“Whatever for? The count was a dick to you!”

“I insulted… his demon.”

“Beg pardon?”

“His doctor.” I may have been mistaken but the half-smile he gave me took on a rather wily and mischievous shade. “I… misspoke.”

“Oh, you mean Aramis!” I understood. Upon the very brink of death, and this is what he wanted to convey? His regrets for having offended my cousin’s revenant! “No harm done there: the demon wanted to eat you! Well, have no fears. I’m sure Athos has forgiven all that. He is family after all.” Alex’s eyes widened at that. “Oh, you did not know? It’s a good thing then that your rather juvenile crush on him went no further, eh?”

“Da..,” he exhaled with relief. With what strength he had left in him, I felt him squeezing my hand. “Tell me… a story.”

For a moment, I wanted to protest, to tell him that of the two of us he had ever been the more skilled storyteller. But then he closed his eyes, and suddenly turned back into the six year old boy that I had left in his bed in Villers-Cotterêts, asleep and with his dreams filled with tales of voyages upon the seven seas, of gods and of monsters. I had never witnessed this before: this ending of something that I had seen born, and born of myself. And suddenly, I knew why it was that Athos could die of a broken heart.

I took a deep breath and started to speak, to spin a yarn so old that no words had existed at its inception to enable man to speak of it. I spoke of the Sun. I spoke of Gaia and Saturn. I spoke of powers that moved the planes of earth until they scattered across the seas. I spoke of my own birth and of the woman who had been beloved of Helios, my mother.

After a while, his eyes flew open and he fixed them upon me with great intent. “Where are they?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The count… and the doctor?”

“Last time I saw them it was in Istria. Groping each other in a Kringa cemetery, like newly weds. I believe Aramis had some inkling to study medicine in Vienna. I do not know where they would have moved onto by now.”

“Hm,” Alex smiled and once more closed his eyes. “I shall never know... how it all... comes out now.”

Those had been his final words. He never opened his eyes again.

***

**Transylvania, December 5, 1970**

The Night of the Wolf was fading away; the tendrils of darkness that had spilled over the land withdrew into the caverns and roots of trees where they dwelled. The old gods were going back to sleep. My god, he too slept, that magnificent body that no longer bore any signs of injuries was stretched out under the eiderdown. Dark hair on the white pillow and dark lashes against pale skin. There was a faint golden shimmer around his face, like a halo, like the outline of an Achaean helmet that had shielded him from the men who had come to kill me.

I left him. I stood and put on the fur of the bear that he had slain for me in Siberia, and then I stole from the room. Through the inn and through the door, which swung open for me without a sound, and down the winding snow-white path, flanked by black, dry thicket of dead bushes. I snuck along the bristly edge of darkness, the fur of my coat catching in the leafless twigs, and the soft creak of snow blended with the cacophony of crackling and rattling that had reached its apogee on the Night of the Wolf. It too was fading away. But here and now, in the bright light of the moonless night, on the false milky day, long past midnight, long before dawn, I could still hear it.

The black eyes of darkness and the silver-grey eyes of the demons and pagan godlings who had crawled out from blood-soaked soil on the Night of the Wolf were dimming, the gurgle from a hundred throats was dwindling. In the scattered light of the snow, of the pale air, of the milky skies, in the chiaroscuro print of the winter night, I stood: Simara, black and white, ebony and alabaster, and I raised my arms to heavens.

“Go.” Words spoken in the ancient language of my youth, in the hiss of the serpent, winding through the air like smoke, into the dark crevices where no human could penetrate, like music that played in my head. “This world is no longer yours. It belongs to humans now. To _mortals_. Go and hide, and I will protect you. Sleep. You will be woken when the time comes.”

A hundred black and silver-grey eyes blinked. I did not watch, nor did I listen. I turned and walked back to the inn, gliding back inside, gliding through the room and into the staircase. I crossed myself as I passed under the crucifix above the door. The velvety cloak of darkness rendered me invisible and inaudible to human eyes and ears. I slunk past the door behind which the Olympian guardian lay in dreamless sleep. The Grigori had been sent to Earth to protect the son of God from evil, yet he never succeeded in keeping a demon away from him.

The gods were asleep, and so was he. The light of the snow cast a shimmering glow through the window, as if the veil of the Dame Blanche had been thrown over the walls and the bed. Athos lay on his back, one hand palm-upwards on the edge of the bed, and his face was turned away from the window, towards me, as I approached him, silent like Death. I watched him as I pushed the fur coat down my shoulders and stood naked and shivering before him. Those fine lines of temple, brow and cheekbone, unchanged after centuries. The long neck, strong muscles and strong pulse of blood, calling out to me. The fragrance of the potion that ran through his veins sleeted off him in tantalising wafts. I opened my mouth to suck in his scent. So beautiful. So noble. So full of tenderness and love for me. He had seen the face of Simara and he chose to love rather than destroy. Nobody but him could have reined in the ancient powers that had coursed through me that night. He was the Lord my God, and I had no others before him.

I slid into bed, under the eiderdown, into the heat of his body, and straddled his hips. My fingertips trailed over his thigh, where the wound caused by the hunter’s spear had healed, and then-

Hands on my hips, dark eyes staring into my souls, as if he knew exactly whence I’d returned, and that voice, husky with sleep, the deep, silky purr of Athos that made the very bones in my body tremble.

“What have we here?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A vat for all your tears:
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> (The Arathos will use it inappropriately though.)


End file.
